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A NEW PHILOSOPHY 
HENRI BERGSON 



A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

HENRI BERGSON 



BY 

EDOUARD LE ROY 

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY 

VINCENT BENSON, M.A. 

LATE SCHOLAR OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD 



WILLIAMS & NORGATE 

14 HENRIETTA ST., COVENT GARDEN, LONDON 

NEW YORK : HENRY HOLT & COMPANY 

1913 






©CI, flint 14 74 



PREFACE 

This little book is due to two articles pub- 
lished under the same title in the Revue des 
Deux Mondes, 1st and 15th February 1912. 

Their object was to present Mr Bergson's 
philosophy to the public at large, giving as 
short a sketch as possible, and describing, 
without too minute details, the general trend 
of his movement. These articles I have here 
reprinted intact. But I have added, in the 
form of continuous notes, some additional 
explanations on points which did not come 
within the scope of investigation in the original 
sketch. 

1 need hardly add that my work, though 
thus far complete, does not in any way claim 
to be a profound critical study. Indeed, such 
a study, dealing with a thinker who has not yet 
said his last word, would to-day be premature. 
I have simply aimed at writing an introduction 
which will make it easier to read and understand 



vi A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

Mr Bergson's works, and serve as a preliminary 
guide to those who desire initiation in the new 
philosophy. 

I have therefore firmly waived all the para- 
phernalia of technical discussions, and have 
made no comparisons, learned or otherwise, 
between Mr Bergson's teaching and that of 
older philosophies. 

I can conceive no better method of mis- 
understanding the point at issue, I mean the 
simple unity of productive intuition, than that 
of pigeon-holing names of systems, collecting 
instances of resemblance, making up analogies, 
and specifying ingredients. An original philo- 
sophy is not meant to be studied as a mosaic 
which takes to pieces, a compound which 
analyses, or a body which dissects. On the 
contrary, it is by considering it as a living act, 
not as a rather clever discourse, by examining 
the peculiar excellence of its soul rather than 
the formation of its body, that the inquirer 
will succeed in understanding it. Properly 
speaking, I have only applied to Mr Bergson 
the method which he himself justifiably pre- 
scribes in a recent article {Revue de Meta- 
physique et de Morale, November 1911), the 
only method, in fact, which is in all senses of 
the word fully " exact." I shall none the less 



PREFACE vii 

be glad if these brief pages can be of any 
interest to professional philosophers, and have 
endeavoured, as far as possible, to allow them 
to trace, under the concise formulae employed, 
the scheme which I have refused to develop. 

It has become evident to me that even to- 
day the interpretation of Mr Bergson's position 
is in many cases full of faults, which it would 
undoubtedly be worth while to assist in re- 
moving. I may or may not have succeeded 
in my attempt, but such, at any rate, is the 
precise end I had in view. 

In conclusion, I may say that I have not had 
the honour of being Mr Bergson's pupil ; and, 
at the time when I became acquainted with 
his outlook, my own direct reflection on 
science and life had already produced in me 
similar trains of thought. I found in his work 
the striking realisation of a presentiment and 
a desire. This "correspondence," which I 
have not exaggerated, proved at once a help 
and a hindrance to me in entering into the 
exact comprehension of so profoundly original 
a doctrine. The reader will thus understand 
that I think it in place to quote my authority 
to him in the following lines which Mr 
Bergson kindly wrote me after the publication 
of the articles reproduced in this volume : 



viii A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

"Underneath and beyond the method you 
have caught the intention and the spirit. . . . 
Your study could not be more conscientious 
or true to the original. As it advances, con- 
densation increases in a marked degree: the 
reader becomes aware that the explanation 
is undergoing a progressive involution similar 
to the involution by which we determine 
the reality of Time. To produce this feel- 
ing, much more has been necessary than a 
close study of my works: it has required 
deep sympathy of thought, the power, in fact, 
of rethinking the subject in a personal and 
original manner. Nowhere is this sympathy 
more in evidence than in your concluding pages, 
where in a few words you point out the possi- 
bilities of further developments of the doctrine. 
In this direction I should myself say exactly 
what you have said/' 

Paris, 28th March 1912. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Preface v 



GENERAL VIEW 

I. Method ....... 1 

Scope of Henri Bergson's Philosophy. Material and 
Authorities. Investigation of Common-sense. Value 
of Science. Perception Discussed. Practical Life 
and Reality. Concepts and Symbolism. Intuition 
and Analysis. Use of Metaphor. The Philoso- 
pher's Task. 

II. Teaching ....... 60 

The Ego. Space and Number. Parallelism. Henri 
Bergson's View of Mind and Matter. Qualitative 
Continuity. Memory. Real Duration Heterogeneous. 
Liberty and Determinism. Meaning of Reality. 
Evolution and Automatism. Triumph of Man. The 
Vital Impulse. Objections Refuted. Place of 
Religion in the New Philosophy. 

ADDITIONAL EXPLANATIONS 

I. Henri Bergson's Work and the General 

Directions of Contemporary Thought . 126 

Mathematics and Philosophy. The Inert and the 
Living. Realism and Positivism. Henri Bergson and 
the Intuition of Duration. 



x A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

PAGK 

II. Immediacy . . . . . . .142 

Necessity of Criticism. Utilitarianism of Common- 
sense. Perception of Immediacy. 

III. Theory of Perception . . . .156 

Pure and Ordinary Perception. Kant's Position. 
Relation of Perception to Matter. Complete 
Experience. 

IV. Critique of Language . . . . .167 

Dynamic Schemes. Dangers of Language. The 
Eleatic Dialectic. Scientific Thought and the Task 
of Intuition. Discussion of Change. 

V. The Problem of Consciousness: Duration 

and Liberty . . . . . .185 

States as Phases in Duration. The Scientific View 
of Time. Duration and Freedom. Liberty and 
Determinism in the Light of Henri Bergson's Phil- 
osophy. 

VI. The Problem of Evolution : Life and 

Matter 201 

Evolution and Creation. Laws of Conservation and 
Degradation. Quantity and Quality. Secondary 
Value of Matter. 

VII. The Problem of Knowledge : Analysis and 

Intuition ...... 210 

Difficulties of Kant's Position. Insufficiency of 
Intelligence. Henri Bergson and the Problem of 
Reason. Geometric and Vital Types of Order. 

VIII. Conclusion 223 

Moral and Religious Problems. Henri Bergson's 
Position. 



A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

GENERAL VIEW 

I 
METHOD 

There is a thinker whose name is to-day on 
everybody's lips, who is deemed by acknow- 
ledged philosophers worthy of comparison with 
the greatest, and who, with his pen as well as 
his brain, has overleapt all technical obstacles, 
and won himself a reading both outside and 
inside the schools. Beyond any doubt, and by 
common consent, Mr Henri Bergson's work 
will appear to future eyes among the most 
characteristic, fertile, and glorious of our era. 
It marks a never-to-be-forgotten date in 
history ; it opens up a phase of metaphysical 
thought ; it lays down a principle of develop- 
ment the limits of which are indeterminable ; 
and it is after cool consideration, with full 

consciousness of the exact value of words, that 

1 1 



2 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

we are able to pronounce the revolution which 
it effects equal in importance to that effected 
by Kant, or even by Socrates. 

Everybody, indeed, has become aware of 
this more or less clearly. Else how are we 
to explain, except through such recognition, 
the sudden striking spread of this new philo- 
sophy which, by its learned rigorism, precluded 
the likelihood of so rapid a triumph ? 

Twenty years have sufficed to make its 
results felt far beyond traditional limits : and 
now its influence is alive and working from 
one pole of thought to the other; and the 
active leaven contained in it can be seen 
already extending to the most varied and 
distant spheres : in social and political spheres, 
where from opposite points, and not without 
certain abuses, an attempt is already being 
made to wrench it in contrary directions ; in 
the sphere of religious speculation, where it 
has been more legitimately summoned to 
a distinguished, illuminative, and beneficent 
career ; in the sphere of pure science, where, 
despite old separatist prejudices, the ideas 
sown are pushing up here and there ; and 
lastly, in the sphere of art, where there are 
indications that it is likely to help certain 
presentiments, which have till now remained 



METHOD 3 

obscure, to become conscious of themselves. 
The moment is favourable to a study of Mr 
Bergson's philosophy ; but in the face of so 
many attempted methods of employment, 
some of them a trifle premature, the point 
of paramount importance, applying Mr Berg- 
son's own method to himself, is to study his 
philosophy in itself, for itself, in its profound 
trend and its authenticated action, without 
claiming to enlist it in the ranks of any cause 
whatsoever. 



Mr Bergson's readers will undergo at almost 
every page they read an intense and singular 
experience. The curtain drawn between 
ourselves and reality, enveloping everything 
including ourselves in its illusive folds, seems 
of a sudden to fall, dissipated by enchantment, 
and display to the mind depths of light till 
then undreamt, in which reality itself, contem- 
plated face to face for 'the first time, stands 
fully revealed. The revelation is overpowering, 
and once vouchsafed will never afterwards be 
forgotten. 

Nothing can convey to the reader the effects 
of this direct and intimate mental vision. 
Everything which he thought he knew already 



4 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

finds new birth and vigour in the clear light 
of morning: on all hands, in the glow of 
dawn, new intuitions spring up and open out ; 
we feel them big with infinite consequences, 
heavy and saturated with life. Each of them 
is no sooner blown than it appears fertile for 
ever. And yet there is nothing paradoxical 
or disturbing in the novelty. It is a reply to 
our expectation, an answer to some dim hope. 
So vivid is the impression of truth, that after- 
wards we are even ready to believe we recognise 
the revelation as if we had always darkly 
anticipated it in some mysterious twilight at 
the back of consciousness. 

Afterwards, no doubt, in certain cases, 
incertitude reappears, sometimes even decided 
objections. The reader, who at first was under 
a magic spell, corrects his thought, or at least 
hesitates. What he has seen is still at bottom 
so new, so unexpected, so far removed from 
familiar conceptions. For this surging wave 
of thought our mind contains none of those 
ready-cut channels which render comprehension 
easy. But whether, in the long run, we each 
of us give or refuse complete or partial ad- 
hesion, all of us, at least, have received a 
regenerating shock, an internal upheaval not 
readily silenced : the network of our intellec- 



METHOD 5 

tual habits is broken ; henceforth a new leaven 
works and ferments in us ; we shall no longer 
think as we used to think ; and be w r e pupils 
or critics, we cannot mistake the fact that we 
have here a principle of integral renewal for 
ancient philosophy and its old and timeworn 
problems. 

It is obviously impossible to sketch in brief 
all the aspects and all the wealth of so original 
a work. Still less shall I be able to answer 
here the many questions which arise. I must 
decide to pass rapidly over the technical detail 
of clear, closely-argued, and penetrating discus- 
sions ; over the scope and exactness of the 
evidence borrowed from the most diverse posi- 
tive sciences ; over the marvellous dexterity 
of the psychological analysis ; over the magic 
of a style which can call up what words cannot 
express. The solidity of the construction will 
not be evidenced in these pages, nor its austere 
and subtle beauty. But what I do at all costs 
wish to bring out, in shorter form, in this new 
philosophy, is its directing idea and general 
movement. 

In such an undertaking, where the end is 
to understand rather than to judge, criticism 
ought to take second place. It is more profit- 
able to attempt to feel oneself into the heart 



6 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

of the teaching, to relive its genesis, to per- 
ceive the principle of organic unity, to come 
at the mainspring. Let our reading be a 
course of meditation which we live. The only 
true homage we can render to the masters of 
thought consists in ourselves thinking, as far 
as we can do so, in their train, under their 
inspiration, and along the paths which they 
have opened up. 

In the case before us this road is landmarked 
by several books which it will be sufficient to 
study one after the other, and take successively 
as the text of our reflections. 

In 1889 Mr Bergson made his appearance 
with an Essay on the Immediate Data of Con- 
sciousness. 

This was his doctors thesis. Taking up his 
position inside the human personality, in its 
inmost mind, he endeavoured to lay hold of 
the depths of life and free action in their 
commonly overlooked and fugitive originality. 

Some years later, in 1896, passing this time 
to the externals of consciousness, the contact 
surface between things and the ego, he pub- 
lished Matter and Memory, a masterly study 
of perception and recollection, which he him- 
self put forward as an inquiry into the relation 
between body and mind. In 1907 he followed 



METHOD 7 

with Creative Evolution, in which the new 
metaphysie was outlined in its full breadth, 
and developed with a wealth of suggestion 
and perspective opening upon the distances of 
infinity; universal evolution, the meaning of 
life, the nature of mind and matter, of intelli- 
gence and instinct, were the great problems 
here treated, ending in a general critique of 
knowledge and a completely original definition 
of philosophy. 

These will be our guides which we shall 
carefully follow, step by step. It is not, I 
must confess, without some apprehension that 
I undertake the task of summing up so much 
research, and of condensing into a few pages 
so many and such new conclusions. 

Mr Bergson excels, even on points of least 
significance, in producing the feeling of un- 
fathomed depths and infinite levels. Never 
has anyone better understood how to fulfil 
the philosopher's first task, in pointing out 
the hidden mystery in everything. With him 
we see all at once the concrete thickness and 
inexhaustible extension of the most familiar 
reality, which has always been before our eyes, 
where before we were aware only of the 
external film. 

Do not imagine that this is simply a poetical 



— • -• • 



8 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

delusion. We must be grateful if the philo- 
sopher uses exquisite language and writes in 
a style which abounds in living images. These 
are rare qualities. But let us avoid being 
duped by a show of printed matter: these 
unannotated pages are supported by positive 
science submitted to the most minute in- 
spection. One day, in 1901, at the French 
Philosophical Society, Mr Bergson related the 
genesis of Matter and Memory. 

" Twelve years or so before its appearance, 
I had set myself the following problem: 
1 What would be the teaching of the physiology 
and pathology of to-day upon the ancient 
question of the connection between physical 
and moral to an unprejudiced mind, determined 
to forget all speculation in which it has in- 
dulged on this point, determined also to 
neglect, in the enunciations of philosophers, 
all that is not pure and simple statement of 
fact V I set myself to solve the problem, and 
I very soon perceived that the question was 
susceptible of a provisional solution, and even 
of precise formulation, only if restricted to 
the problem of memory. In memory itself 
I was forced to determine bounds which I had 
afterwards to narrow considerably. After 
confining myself to the recollection of words 



METHOD 9 

I saw that the problem, as stated, was still 
too broad, and that, to put the question 
in its most precise and interesting form, I 
should have to substitute the recollection 
of the sound of words. The literature on 
aphasia is enormous. I took five years to 
sift it. And I arrived at this conclusion, 
that between the psychological fact and its 
corresponding basis in the brain there must 
be a relation which answers to none of 
the ready-made concepts furnished us by 
philosophy." 

Certain characteristics of Mr Bergson's 
manner will be remarked throughout : his 
provisional effort of forgetfulness to recreate a 
new and untrammelled mind ; his mixture of 
positive inquiry and bold invention ; his 
stupendous reading ; his vast pioneer work 
carried on with indefatigable patience ; his 
constant correction by criticism, informed of 
the minutest details and swift to follow up 
each of them at every turn. With a problem 
which would at first have seemed secondary 
and incomplete, but which reappears as the 
subject deepens and is thereby metamorphosed, 
he connects his entire philosophy ; and so well 
does he blend the whole and breathe upon it 
the breath of life that the final statement 



10 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

leaves the reader with an impression of 
sovereign ease. 

Examples will be necessary to enable us, 
even to a feeble extent, to understand this 
proceeding better. But before we come to 
examples, a preliminary question requires 
examination. In the preface to his first Essay 
Mr Bergson defined the principle of a method 
which was afterwards to reappear in its 
identity throughout his various works ; and 
we must recall the terms he employed. 

" We are forced to express ourselves in 
words, and we think, most often, in space. 
To put it another way, language compels us 
to establish between our ideas the same clear 
and precise distinctions, and the same break 
in continuity, as between material objects. 
This assimilation is useful in practical life and 
necessary in most sciences. But we are right 
in asking whether the insuperable difficulties 
of certain philosophical problems do not arise 
from the fact that we persist in placing non- 
spatial phenomena next one another in space, 
and whether, if we did away with the vulgar 
illustrations round which we dispute, we 
should not sometimes put an end to the 
dispute." 

That is to say, it is stated to be the 



METHOD 11 

philosopher's duty from the outset to renounce 
the usual forms of analytic and synthetic 
thought, and to achieve a direct intuitional 
effort which shall put him in immediate 
contact with reality. Without doubt it is this 
question of method which demands our first 
attention. It is the leading question. Mr 
Bergson himself presents his works as " essays " 
which do not aim at "solving the greatest 
problems all at once," but seek merely "to 
define the method and disclose the possibility 
of applying it on some essential points." 1 It 
is also a delicate question, for it dominates all 
the rest, and decides whether we shall fully 
understand what is to follow. 

We must therefore pause here a moment. 
To direct us in this preliminary study we have 
an admirable Introduction to Metaphysics, 
which appeared as an article in the Meta- 
physical and Moral Review (January 1903) : 
a short but marvellously suggestive memoire, 
constituting the best preface to the reading of 
the books themselves. We may say in pass- 
ing, that we should be grateful to Mr Bergson 
if he would have it bound in volume form, 
along with some other articles which are 
scarcely to be had at all to-day. 

1 Preface to Creative Evolution. 



12 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

II 

Every philosophy, prior to taking shape in 
a group of co-ordinated theses, presents itself, 
in its initial stage, as an attitude, a frame of 
mind, a method. Nothing can be more im- 
portant than to study this starting-point, this 
elementary act of direction and movement, if 
we wish afterwards to arrive at the precise 
shade of meaning of the subsequent teaching. 
Here is really the fountain-head of thought ; 
it is here that the form of the future system is 
determined, and here that contact with reality 
takes effect. 

The last point, particularly, is vital. To 
return to the direct view of things beyond all 
figurative symbols, to descend into the inmost 
depths of being, to watch the throbbing life in 
its pure state, and listen to the secret rhythm 
of its inmost breath, to measure it, at least 
so far as measurement is possible, has always 
been the philosopher's ambition ; and the new 
philosophy has not departed from this ideal. 
But in what light does it regard its task? 
That is the first point to clear up. For the 
problem is complex, and the goal distant. 

"We are made as much, and more, for 
action than for thought," says Mr Bergson; 



METHOD 13 

"or rather, when we follow our natural im- 
pulse, it is to act that we think." * And again, 
" What we ordinarily call a fact is not reality 
such as it would appear to an immediate 
intuition, but an adaptation of reality to 
practical interests and the demands of social 
life." 2 Hence the question which takes pre- 
cedence of all others is : to distinguish in our 
common representation of the world, the fact in 
its true sense from the combinations which we 
have introduced in view of action and language. 

Now, to rediscover nature in her fresh springs 
of reality, it is not sufficient to abandon the 
images and conceptions invented by human 
initiative ; still less is it sufficient to fling our- 
selves into the torrent of brute sensations. By 
so doing we are in danger of dissolving our 
thought in dream or quenching it in night. 

Above all, we are in danger of committal to 
a path which it is impossible to follow. The 
philosopher is not free to begin the work of 
knowledge again upon other planes, with a 
mind which would be adequate to the new and 
virgin issue of a simple writ of oblivion. 

At the time when critical reflection begins, 
we have already been long engaged in action 

1 & Evolution Creatrice, p. 321. 

2 Matter e et Memoir e, p. 201. 



;\ 



14 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

and science ; by the training of individual 
life, as by hereditary and racial experience, 
our faculties of perception and conception, 
our senses and our understanding, have con- 
tracted habits, which are by this time un- 
conscious and instinctive ; we are haunted by 
all kinds of ideas and principles, so familiar 
to-day that they even pass unobserved. But 
what is it all worth ? 

Does it, in its present state, help us to know 
the nature of a disinterested intuition ? 

Nothing but a methodical examination of 
consciousness can tell us that ; and it will take 
more than a renunciation of explicit knowledge 
to recreate in us a new mind, capable of grasp- 
ing the bare fact exactly as it is : what we 
require is perhaps a penetrating reform, a kind 
of conversion. 

The rational and perceptive function we 
term our intelligence emerges from darkness 
through a slowly lifting dawn. During this 
twilight period it has lived, worked, acted, 
fashioned and informed itself. On the thres- 
hold of philosophical speculation it is full of 
more or less concealed beliefs, which are 
literally prejudices, and branded with a secret 
mark influencing its every movement. Here 
is an actual situation. Exemption from it is 



METHOD 15 

beyond anyone's province. Whether we will 
or no, we are from the beginning of our 
inquiry immersed in a doctrine which dis- 
guises nature to us, and already at bottom 
constitutes a complete metaphysic. This we 
term common-sense, and positive science is itself 
only an extension and refinement of it. What 
is the value of this work performed with- 
out clear consciousness or critical attention? 
Does it bring us into true relation with 
things, into relation with pure consciousness ? 

This is our first and inevitable doubt, which 
requires solution. 

But it would be a quixotic proceeding first 
to make a void in our mind, and afterwards to 
admit into it, one by one, after investigation, 
such and such a concept, or such and such a 
principle. The illusion of the clean sweep 
and total reconstruction can never be too 
vigorously condemned. 

Is it from the void that we set out to think ? 
Do we think in void, and with nothing? 
Common ideas of necessity form the ground- 
work for the broidery of our advanced thought. 
Further, even if we succeeded in our impossible 
task, should we, in so doing, have corrected 
the causes of error which are to-day graven 
upon the very structure of our intelligence, 



16 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

such as our past life has made it? These 
errors would not cease to act imperceptibly 
upon the work of revision intended to apply 
the remedy. 

It is from within, by an effort of immanent 
purgation, that the necessary reform must be 
brought about. And philosophy's first task is 
to institute critical reflection upon the obscure 
beginnings of thought, with a view to shedding 
light upon its spontaneous virgin condition, 
but without any vain claim to lift it out of the 
current in which it is actually plunged. 

One conclusion is already plain : the ground- 
work of common-sense is sure, but the form is 
suspicious. 

In common-sense is contained, at any rate 
virtually and in embryo, all that can ever be 
attained of reality, for reality is verification, 
not construction. 

Everything has its starting-point in con- 
struction and verification. Thus philosophical 
research can only be a conscious and deliberate 
return to the facts of primal intuition. But 
common-sense, being prepossessed in a practical 
direction, has doubtless subjected these facts 
to a process of interested alteration, which is 
artificial in proportion to the labour bestowed. 
Such is Mr Bergson's fundamental hypothesis, 



METHOD 17 

and it is far-reaching. u Many metaphysical 
difficulties probably arise from our habit of 
confounding speculation and practice ; or of 
pushing an idea in the direction of utility, 
when we think we fathom it in theory ; or, 
lastly, of employing in thought the forms of 
action. 5 ' 1 

The work of reform will consist therefore 
in freeing our intelligence from its utilitarian 
habits, by endeavouring at the outset to be- 
come clearly conscious of them. 

Notice how far presumption is in favour of 
our hypothesis. Whether we regard organic 
life in the genesis and preservation of the 
individual, or in the evolution of species, we 
see its natural direction to be towards utility : 
but the effort of thought comes after the effort 
of life ; it is not added from outside, it is the 
continuance and the flower of the former effort. 
Must we not expect from this that it will pre- 
serve its former habits ? And what do we 
actually observe ? The first gleam of human 
intelligence in prehistoric times is revealed to 
us by an industry ; the cut flint of the primi- 
tive caves marks the first stage of the road 
which was one day to end in the most sublime 
philosophies. Again, every science has begun 

1 Preface to Matter and Memory. First edition. 

2 



T'-rrfcTE , 



18 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

by practical arts. Indeed, our science of to- 
day, however disinterested it may have become, 
remains none the less in close relation with the 
demands of our action ; it permits us to speak 
of and to handle things rather than to see them 
in their intimate and profound nature. Analysis, 
when applied to our operations of knowledge, 
shows us that our understanding parcels out, 
arrests, and quantifies, whereas reality, as it 
appears to immediate intuition, is a moving 
series, a flux of blended qualities. 

That is to say, our understanding solidifies 
all that it touches. Have we not here exactly 
the essential postulates of action and speech ? 
To speak, as to act, we must have separable 
elements, terms and objects which remain inert 
while the operation goes on, maintaining be- 
tween themselves the constant relations which 
find their most perfect and ideal presentment 
in mathematics. 

Everything tends, then, to incline us towards 
the hypothesis in question. Let us regard it 
henceforward as expressing a fact. 

The forms of knowledge elaborated by 
common-sense were not originally intended 
to allow us to see reality as it is. 

Their task was rather, and remains so, to 
enable us to grasp its practical aspect. It is 



METHOD 19 

for that they are made, not for philosophical 
speculation. 

Now these forms nevertheless have existed 
in us as inveterate habits, soon becoming 
unconscious, even when we have reached the 
point of desiring knowledge for its own sake. 

But in this new stage they preserve the bias 
of their original utilitarian function, and carry 
this mark with them everywhere, leaving it 
upon the fresh tasks which we are fain to 
make them accomplish. 

An inner reform is therefore imperative 
to-day, if we are to succeed in unearthing and 
sifting, in our perception of nature, under the 
veinstone of practical symbolism, the true 
intuitional content. 

This attempt at return to the standpoint of 
pure contemplation and disinterested experi- 
ence is a task very different from the task of 
science. It is one thing to regard more and 
more or less and less closely with the eyes 
made for us by utilitarian evolution : it is 
another to labour at remaking for ourselves 
eyes capable of seeing, in order to see, and 
not in order to live. 

Philosophy understood in this manner — and 
we shall see more and more clearly as we go 
on that there is no other legitimate method of 



— ■ » m m +m m a ■ ■■ ■ -*~M 



20 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

understanding it — demands from us an almost 
violent act of reform and conversion. 

The mind must turn round upon itself, 
invert the habitual direction of its thought, 
climb the hill down which its instinct towards 
action has carried it, and go to seek experience 
at its source, " above the critical bend where 
it inclines towards our practical use and be- 
comes, properly speaking, human experience." 1 
In short, by a twin effort of criticism and 
expansion, it must pass outside common-sense 
and synthetic understanding to return to pure 
intuition. 

Philosophy consists in reliving the immediate 
over again, and in interpreting our rational 
science and everyday perception by its light. 
That, at least, is the first stage. We shall 
find afterwards that that is not all. 

Here is a genuinely new conception of 
philosophy. Here, for the first time, philo- 
sophy is made specifically distinct from science, 
yet remains no less positive. 

What science really does is to preserve the 
general attitude of common-sense, with its 
apparatus of forms and principles. 

It is true that science develops and perfects 
it, refines and extends it, and even now and 

1 Matter and Memory, p. 203. 



METHOD 21 

again corrects it. But science does not change 
either the direction or the essential steps. 

In this philosophy, on the contrary, what is 
at first suspected and finally modified, is the 
setting of the points before the journey begins. 

Not that, in saying so, we mean to condemn 
science ; but we must recognise its just limits. 
The methods of science proper are in their 
place and appropriate, and lead to a knowledge 
which is true (though still symbolical), so 
long as the object studied is the world of 
practical action, or, to put it briefly, the world 
of inert matter. 

But soul, life, and activity escape it, and 
yet these are the spring and ultimate basis of 
everything : and it is the appreciation of this 
fact, with what it entails, that is new. And 
yet, new as Mr Bergson's conception of philo- 
sophy may deservedly appear, it does not any 
the less, from another point of view, deserve 
to be styled classic and traditional. 

What it really defines is not so much a 
particular philosophy as philosophy itself, in 
its original function. 

Everywhere in history we find its secret 
current at its task. 

All great philosophers have had glimpses of 
it, and employed it in moments of discovery. 



22 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

Only as a general rule they have not clearly 
recognised what they were doing, and so have 
soon turned aside. 

But on this point I cannot insist without 
going into lengthy detail, and am obliged to 
refer the reader to the fourth chapter of 
Creative Evolution, where he will find the 
whole question dealt with. 

One remark, however, has still to be made. 
Philosophy, according to Mr Bergson's con- 
ception, implies and demands time; it does 
not aim at completion all at once, for the 
mental reform in question is of the kind which 
requires gradual fulfilment. The truth which it 
involves does not set out to be a non-temporal 
essence, which a sufficiently powerful genius 
would be able, under pressure, to perceive in 
its entirety at one view ; and that again seems 
to be very new. 

I do not, of course, wish to abuse systems 
of philosophy. Each of them is an experience 
of thought, a moment in the life of thought, 
a method of exploring reality, a reagent which 
reveals an aspect. Truth undergoes analysis 
into systems as does light into colours. 

But the mere name system calls up the 
static idea of a finished building. Here there 
is nothing of the kind. The new philosophy 



METHOD 23 

desires to be a proceeding as much as, and even 
more than, to be a system. It insists on being 
lived as well as thought. It demands that 
thought should work at living its true life, an 
inner life related to itself, effective, active, and 
creative, but not on that account directed 
towards external action. "And," says Mr 
Bergson, " it can only be constructed by the 
collective and progressive effort of many 
thinkers, and of many observers, completing, 
correcting, and righting one another." 1 

Let us see how it begins, and what is its 
generating act. 

Ill 

How are we to attain the immediate ? How 
are we to realise this perception of pure fact 
which we stated to be the philosopher's first 
step? 

Unless we can clear up this doubt, the end 
proposed will remain to our gaze an abstract 
and lifeless ideal. This is, then, the point 
which requires instant explanation. For there 
is a serious difficulty in which the very em- 
ployment of the word "immediate" might 
lead us astray. 

The immediate, in the sense which concerns 

1 Preface to Creative Evolution, 



24 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

us, is not at all, or at least is no longer for 
us the passive experience, the indefinable some- 
thing which we should inevitably receive, 
provided we opened our eyes and abstained 
from reflection. 

As a matter of fact, we cannot abstain from 
reflection : reflection is to-day part of our very 
vision ; it comes into play as soon as we open 
our eyes. So that, to come on the trail of the 
immediate, there must be effort and work. 
How are we to guide this effort? In what 
will this work consist ? By what sign shall 
we be able to recognise that the result has 
been obtained? 

These are the questions to be cleared up. 
Mr Bergson speaks of them chiefly in connec- 
tion with the realities of consciousness, or, 
more generally speaking, of life. And it is 
here, in fact, that the consequences are most 
weighty and far-reaching. We shall need 
to refer to them again in detail. But to 
simplify my explanation, I will here choose 
another example : that of inert matter, of the 
perception on which the physical is based. 
It is in this case that the divergence between 
common perception and pure perception, how- 
ever real it may be, assumes least proportions. 

Therefore it appears most in place in the 



_.- 



METHOD 25 

sketch I desire to trace of an exceedingly 
complex work, where I can only hope, evi- 
dently, to indicate the main lines and general 
direction. 

We readily believe that when we cast our 
eyes upon surrounding objects, we enter into 
them unresistingly and apprehend them all 
at once in their intrinsic nature. Perception 
would thus be nothing but simple passive 
registration. But nothing could be more 
untrue, if we are speaking of the perception 
which we employ without profound criticism 
in the course of our daily life. What we here 
take to be pure fact is, on the contrary, the 
last term in a highly complicated series of 
mental operations. And this term contains 
as much of us as of things. 

In fact, all concrete perception comes up for 
analysis as an indissoluble mixture of con- 
struction and fact, in which the fact is only 
revealed through the construction, and takes 
on its complexion. We all know by experience 
how incapable the uneducated person is of 
explaining the simple appearance of the least 
fact, without embodying a crowd of false 
interpretations. We know to a less extent, 
but it is also true, that the most enlightened 
and adroit person proceeds in just the same 






26 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

manner : his interpretation is better, but it is 
still interpretation. 

That is why accurate observation is so 
difficult ; we see or we do not see, we notice 
such and such an aspect, we read this or that, 
according to our state of consciousness at the 
time, according to the direction of the investi- 
gation on which we are engaged. 

Who was it defined art as nature seen 
through a mind?. Perception, too, is an art. 

This art has its processes, its conventions, 
and its tools. Go into a laboratory and study 
one of those complex instruments which make 
our senses finer or more powerful ; each of 
them is literally a sheaf of materialised theories, 
and by means of it all acquired science is 
brought to bear on each new observation of 
the student. In exactly the same way our 
organs of sense are actual instruments con- 
structed by the unconscious work of the mind 
in the course of biological evolution ; they too 
sum up and give concrete form and expression 
to a system of enlightening theories. But that 
is not all. The most elementary psychology 
shows us the amount of thought, in the correct 
sense of the term, recollection, or inference, 
which enters into what we should be tempted 
to call pure perception. 



METHOD n 

Establishment of fact is not the simple 
reception of the faithful imprint of that fact ; 
it is invariably interpreted, systematised, and 
placed in pre-existing forms which constitute 
veritable theoretical frames. That is why the 
child has to learn to perceive. There is an 
education of the senses which he acquires by 
long training. One day, with the aid of habit, 
he will almost cease to see things : a few lines, 
a few glimpses, a few simple signs noted in a 
brief passing glance, will enable him to recog- 
nise them ; and he will hardly retain any more 
of reality than its schemes and symbols. 

" Perception," says Mr Bergson on this 
subject, " becomes in the end only an oppor- 
tunity of recollection. 55 * 

All concrete perception, it is true, is directed 
less upon the present than the past. The part 
of pure perception in it is small, and im- 
mediately covered and almost buried by the 
contribution of memory. 

This infinitesimal part acts as a bait. It is 
a summons to recollection, challenging us to 
extract from our previous experience, and 
construct with our acquired wealth a system 
of images which permits us to read the experi- 
ence of the moment. 

1 Matter and Memory } p. 59. 



28 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

With our scheme of interpretation thus 
constituted we encounter the few fugitive 
traits which we have actually perceived. If 
the theory we have elaborated adapts itself, 
and succeeds in accounting for, connecting, 
and making sense of these traits, we shall 
finally have a perception properly so called. 

Perception then, in the usual sense of the 
word, is the resolution of a problem, the 
verification of a theory. 

Thus are explained " errors of the senses," 
which are in reality errors of interpretation. 
Thus too, and in the same manner, we have 
the explanation of dreams. 

Let us take a simple example. When you 
read a book, do you spell each syllable, one by 
one, to group the syllables afterwards into 
words, and the words into phrases, thus 
travelling from print to meaning? Not at 
all : you grasp a few letters accurately, a few 
downstrokes in their graphical outline ; then 
you guess the remainder, travelling in the 
reverse direction, from a probable meaning to 
the print which you are interpreting. This 
is what causes mistakes in reading, and the 
well-known difficulty in seeing printing errors. 

This observation is confirmed by curious 
experiments. Write some everyday phrase 



METHOD 29 

or other on a blackboard ; let there be a few 
intentional mistakes here and there, a letter or 
two altered, or left out. Place the words in a 
dark room in front of a person who, of course, 
does not know what has been written. Then 
turn on the light without allowing the observer 
sufficient time to spell the writing. 

In spite of this, he will in most cases read 
the entire phrase, without hesitation or 
difficulty. 

He has restored what was missing, or cor- 
rected what was at fault. 

Now, ask him what letters he is certain he 
saw, and you will find he will tell you an 
omitted or altered letter as well as a letter 
actually written. 

The observer then thinks he sees in broad 
light a letter which is not there, if that letter, 
in virtue of the general sense, ought to appear 
in the phrase. But you can go further, and 
vary the experiment. 

Suppose we write the word " tumult " cor- 
rectly. After doing so, to direct the memory 
of the observer into a certain trend of recol- 
lection, call out in his ear, during the short 
time the light is turned on, another word of 
different meaning, for example, the word 
" railway." 



30 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

The observer will read " tunnel " ; that is to 
say, a word, the graphical outline of which is 
like that of the written word, but connected 
in sense with the order of recollection called 
up. 

In this mistake in reading, as in the spon- 
taneous correction of the previous experiment, 
we see very clearly that perception is always 
the fulfilment of guesswork. 

It is the direction of this work that we are 
concerned to determine. 

According to the popular idea, perception 
has a completely speculative interest : it is 
pure knowledge. Therein lies the funda- 
mental mistake. 

Notice first of all how much more probable 
it is, a priori, that the work of perception, just 
as any other natural and spontaneous work, 
should have a utilitarian signification. 

" Life," says Mr Bergson with justice, " is 
the acceptance from objects of nothing but 
the useful impression, with the response of the 
appropriate reactions." 1 

And this view receives striking objective 
confirmation if, with the author of Matter and 
Memory, we follow the progress of the per- 
ceptive functions along the animal series from 

1 Laughter, p. 154. 



METHOD 31 

the protoplasm to the higher vertebrates ; or if, 
with him, we analyse the task of the body, and 
discover that the nervous system is manifested 
in its very structure as, before all, an instru- 
ment of action. Have we not already besides 
proof of this in the fact that each of us always 
appears in his own eyes to occupy the centre 
of the world he perceives ? 

The Riquet of Anatole France voices Mr 
Bergson's view : " I am always in the centre 
of everything, and men and beasts and things, 
for or against me, range themselves around." 

But direct analysis leads us still more plainly 
to the same conclusion. 

Let us take the perception of bodies. It is 
easy to show — and I regret that I cannot here 
reproduce Mr Bergson's masterly demonstra- 
tion — that the division of matter into distinct 
objects with sharp outlines is produced by a 
selection of images Avhich is completely relative 
to our practical needs. 

"The distinct outlines which we assign to 
an object, and which bestow upon it its indi- 
viduality, are nothing but the graph of a 
certain kind of influence which we should be 
able to employ at a certain point in space : it 
is the plan of our future actions which is 
submitted to our eyes, as in a mirror, when 



32 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

we perceive the surfaces and edges of things. 
Remove this action, and in consequence the 
high roads which it makes for itself in advance 
by perception, in the web of reality, and the 
individuality of the body will be reabsorbed 
in the universal interaction which is without 
doubt reality itself." Which is tantamount 
to saying that "rough bodies are cut in the 
material of nature by a perception of which 
the scissors follow, in some sort, the dotted 
line along which the action would pass." 1 

Bodies independent of common experience 
do not then appear, to an attentive criticism, 
as veritable realities which would have an 
existence in themselves. They are only 
centres of co-ordination for our actions. Or, 
if you prefer it, "our needs are so many 
shafts of light which, when played upon the 
continuity of perceptible qualities, produce in 
them the outline of distinct bodies." 2 Does 
not science too, after its own fashion, resolve 
the atom into a centre of intersecting relations, 
which finally extend by degrees to the entire 
universe in an indissoluble interpenetration ? 

A qualitative continuity, imperceptibly 
shaded off, over which pass quivers that here 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 12. 

2 Matter and Memory, p. 220. 



_ 



METHOD 83 

and there converge, is the image by which we 
are forced to recognise a superior degree of 
reality. 

But is this perceptible material, this quali- 
tative continuity, the pure fact in matter? 
Not yet. Perception, we said just now, is 
always in reality complicated by memory. 
There is more truth in this than we had seen. 
Reality is not a motionless spectrum, extend- 
ing to our view its infinite shades ; it might 
rather be termed a leaping flame in the 
spectrum. All is in passage, in process of 
becoming. 

On this flux consciousness concentrates at 
long intervals, each time condensing into one 
" quality " an immense period of the inner 
history of things. " In just this way the 
thousand successive positions of a runner 
contract into one single symbolic attitude, 
which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, 
and which becomes for everybody the repre- 
sentation of a man running. " * 

In the same way again, a red light, con- 
tinuing one second, embodies such a large 
number of elementary pulsations that it would 
take 25,000 years of our time to see its distinct 
passage. From here springs the subjectivity 

1 Matter and Memory, p. 233. 



34 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

of our perception. The different qualities 
correspond, roughly speaking, to the different 
rhythms of contraction or dilution, to the 
different degrees of inner tension in the 
perceiving consciousness. 

Pushing the case to its limits, and imagining 
a complete expansion, matter would resolve 
into colourless disturbances, and become the 
" pure matter " of the natural philosopher. 

Let us now unite in one single continuity 
the different periods of the preceding dialectic. 
Vibration, qualities, and bodies are none of 
them reality by themselves ; but all the same 
they are part of reality. And absolute reality 
would be the whole of these degrees and 
moments, and many others as well, no doubt. 
Or rather, to secure absolute intuition of 
matter, we should have on the one hand to 
get rid of all that our practical needs have 
constructed, restore on the other all the 
effective tendencies they have extinguished, 
follow the complete scale of qualitative con- 
centrations and dilutions, and pass, by a kind 
of sympathy, into the incessantly moving play 
of all the possible innumerable contractions or 
resolutions; with the result that in the end 
we should succeed, by a simultaneous view as 
it were, in grasping, according to their infinitely 



METHOD 85 

various modes, the phases of this matter 
which, though at present latent, admit of 
"perception." 

Thus, in the case before us, absolute know- 
ledge is found to be the result of integral 
experience ; and though we cannot attain the 
term, we see at any rate in what direction we 
should have to work to reach it. 

Now it must be stated that our realisable 
knowledge is at every moment partial and 
limited rather than exterior and relative, for 
our effective perception is related to matter in 
itself as the part to the whole. Our least 
perceptions are actually based on pure percep- 
tion, and "we are aware of the elementary 
disturbances which constitute matter, in the 
perceptible quality in which they suffer con- 
traction, as we are aware of the beating of our 
heart in the general feeling that we have of 
living." 1 

But the preoccupation of practical action, 
coming between reality and ourselves, produces 
the fragmentary world of common-sense, much 
as an absorbing medium resolves into separate 
rays the continuous spectrum of a luminous 
body ; whilst the rhythm of duration, and the 

1 The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific 
Methods, 7th July 1910. 



^ 



36 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

degree of tension peculiar to our consciousness, 
limit us to the apprehension of certain qualities 
only. 

What then have we to do to progress towards 
absolute knowledge ? Not to quit experience : 
quite the contrary ; but to extend it and 
diversify it by science, while, at the same time, 
by criticism, we correct in it the disturbing 
effects of action, and finally quicken all the 
results thus obtained by an effort of sympathy 
which will make us familiar with the object 
until we feel its profound throbbing and its 
inner wealth. 

In connection with this last vital point, 
which is decisive, call to mind a celebrated 
page of Sainte-Beuve where he defines his 
method : " Enter into your author, make your- 
self at home in him, produce him under his 
different aspects, make him live, move, and 
speak as he must have done; follow him to 
his fireside and in his domestic habits, as 
closely as you can. . . . 

" Study him, turn him round and round, ask 
him questions at your leisure ; place him be- 
fore you. . . . Every feature will appear in 
its turn, and take the place of the man himself 
in this expression. . . . 

" An individual reality will gradually blend 



METHOD 87 

with and become incarnate in the vague, 
abstract, and general type. . . . There is our 
man. ..." Yes, that is exactly what we want : 
it could not be better put. Transpose this 
page from the literary to the metaphysical 
order, and you have intuition, as defined by 
Mr Bergson. You have the return to im- 
mediacy. 

But a new problem then arises : Is not our 
intuition of immediacy in danger of remaining 
inexpressible? For our language has been 
formed in view of practical life, not of pure 
knowledge. 

IV 

The immediate perception of reality is not 
all ; we have still to translate this perception 
into intelligible language, into a connected 
chain of concepts ; failing which, it would 
seem, we should not have knowledge in the 
strict sense of the word, we should not have 
truth. 

Without language, intuition, supposing it 
came to birth, would remain intransmissible 
and incommunicable, and would perish in a 
solitary cry. By language alone are we enabled 
to submit it to a positive test: the letter is 
the ballast of the mind, the body which allows 



88 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

it to act, and in acting to scatter the unreal 
delusions of dream. 

The act of pure intuition demands so great 
an inner tension from thought that it can 
only be very rare and very fugitive: a few 
rapid gleams here and there ; and these dawn- 
ing glimpses must be sustained, and afterwards 
united, and that again is the work of language. 

But while language is thus necessary, no 
less necessary is a criticism of ordinary 
language, and of the methods familiar to the 
understanding. These forms of reflected 
knowledge, these processes of analysis really 
convey secretly all the postulates of practical 
action. But it is imperative that language 
should translate, not betray ; that the body 
of formulas should not stifle the soul of 
intuition. We shall see in what the work of 
reform and conversion imposed on the philo- 
sopher precisely consists. 

The attitude of the ordinary proceedings of 
common thought can be stated in a few words. 
Place the object studied before yourself as an 
exterior " thing." Then place yourself outside 
it, in perspective, at points of vantage on a 
circumference, whence you can only see the 
object of your investigation at a distance, with 
such interval as would be sufficient for the 



METHOD S9 

contemplation of a picture ; in short, move 
round the object instead of entering boldly 
into it. But these proceedings lead to what 
I shall term analysis by concepts ; that is to 
say, the attempt to resolve all reality into 
general ideas. 

What are concepts and abstract ideas really, 
but distant and simplified views, species of 
model drawings, giving only a few summary 
features of their object, which vary according 
to direction and angle ? By means of them 
we claim to determine the object from outside, 
as if, in order to know it, it were sufficient to 
enclose it in a system of logical sides and 
angles. 

And perhaps in this way we do really grasp 
it, perhaps we do establish its precise descrip- 
tion, but we do not penetrate it. 

Concepts translate relations resulting from 
comparisons by which each object is finally 
expressed as a function of what it is not. 
They dismember it, divide it up piece by 
piece, and mount it in various frames. They 
lay hold of it only by ends and corners, by 
resemblances and differences. Is not that 
obviously what is done by the converting 
theories which explain the soul by the body, 
life by matter, quality by movements, space 



40 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

itself by pure number? Is not that what is 
done generally by all criticisms, all doctrines 
which connect one idea to another, or to a 
group of other ideas ? 

In this way we reach only the surface of 
things, the reciprocal contacts, mutual inter- 
sections, and parts common, but not the 
organic unity nor the inner essence. 

In vain we multiply our points of view, our 
perspectives and plane projections : no accumu- 
lation of this kind will reconstruct the concrete 
solid. We can pass from an object directly 
perceived to the pictures which represent it, 
the prints which represent the pictures, the 
scheme representing the prints, because each 
stage contains less than the one before, and is 
obtained from it by simple diminution. 

But, inversely, you may take all the schemes, 
prints, pictures you like — supposing that it is 
not absurd to conceive as given what is by 
nature interminable and inexhaustible, lending 
itself to indefinite enumeration and endless 
development and multiplicity — but you will 
never recompose the profound and original 
unity of the source. 

How, by forcing yourself to seek the object 
outside itself, where it certainly is not, except 
in echo and reflection, would you ever find its 



METHOD 41 

intimate and specific reality? You are but 
condemning yourself to symbolism, for one 
" thing " can only be in another symbolically. 

To go further still, your knowledge of things 
will remain irremediably relative, relative to 
the symbols selected and the points of view 
adopted. Everything will happen as in a 
movement of which the appearance and formula 
vary with the spot from which you regard it, 
with the marks to which you relate it. 

Absolute revelation is only given to the man 
who passes into the object, flings himself upon <> 
its stream, and lives within its rhythm. The 
thesis which maintains the inevitable relativity 
of all human knowledge originates mainly from 
the metaphors employed to describe the act of 
knowledge. The subject occupies this point, 
the object that ; how are we to span the 
distance? Our perceptory organs fill the 
interval; how are we to grasp anything but 
what reaches us in the receiver at the end of 
the wire ? 

The mind itself is a projecting lantern 
playing a shaft of light on nature ; how should 
it do otherwise than tint nature its own 
colour ? 

But these difficulties all arise out of the 
spatial metaphors employed ; and these meta- 



42 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

phors in their turn do little but illustrate and 
translate the common method of analysis by 
concepts : and this method is essentially regu- 
lated by the practical needs of action and 
language. 

The philosopher must adopt an attitude 
entirely inverse ; not keep at a distance from 
things, but listen in a manner to their inward 
breathing, and, above all, supply the effort of 
sympathy by which he establishes himself in 
the object, becomes on intimate terms with it, 
tunes himself to its rhythm, and, in a word, 
lives it. There is really nothing mysterious or 
strange in this. 

Consider your daily judgments in matters of 
art, profession, or sport. 

Between knowledge by theory and know- 
ledge by experience, between understanding by 
external analogy and perception by profound 
intuition, what difference and divergence 
there is ! 

Who has absolute knowledge of a machine, 
the student who analyses it in mechanical 
theorems, or the engineer who has lived in 
comradeship with it, even to sharing the 
physical sensation of its laboured or easy work- 
ing, who feels the play of its inner muscles, its 
likes and dislikes, who notes its movements 



METHOD 48 

and the task before it, as the machine itself 
would do were it conscious, for whom it has 
become an extension of his own body, a new 
sensori -motor organ, a group of prearranged 
gestures and automatic habits ? 

The student's knowledge is more useful to 
the builder, and I do not wish to claim that 
we should ever neglect it ; but the only true 
knowledge is that of the engineer. And what 
I have just said does not concern material 
objects only. Who has absolute knowledge of 
religion, he who analyses it in psychology, 
sociology, history, and metaphysics, or he who, 
from within, by a living experience, participates 
in its essence and holds communion with its 
duration ? 

But the external nature of the knowledge 
obtained by conceptual analysis is only its 
least fault. There are others still more serious. 

If concepts actually express what is common, 
general, unspecific, what should make us feel 
the need of recasting them when we apply 
them to a new object ? 

Does not their ground, their utility, and 
their interest exactly consist in sparing us this 
labour ? 

We regard them as elaborated once for all. 
They are building-material, ready-hewn blocks, 



44 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

which we have only to bring together. They 
are atoms, simple elements — a mathematician 
would say prime factors — capable of associat- 
ing with infinity, but without undergoing any 
inner modification in contact with it. They 
admit linkage ; they can be attached exter- 
nally, but they leave the aggregate as they went 
into it. 

Juxtaposition and arrangement are the 
geometrical operations which typify the work 
of knowledge in such a case ; or else we 
must fall back on metaphors from some 
mental chemistry, such as proportioning and 
combination. 

In all cases, the method is still that 
of alignment and blending of pre-existent 
concepts. 

Now the mere fact of proceeding thus is 
equivalent to setting up the concept as a 
symbol of an abstract class. That being done, 
explanation of a thing is no more than show- 
ing it in the intersection of several classes, 
partaking of each of them in definite propor- 
tions : which is the same as considering it 
sufficiently expressed by a list of general 
frames into which it will go. The unknown 
is then, on principle, and in virtue of this 
theory, referred to the already known ; and it 



METHOD 45 

thereby becomes impossible ever to grasp any 
true novelty or any irreducible originality. 

On principle, once more, we claim to re- 
construct nature with pure symbols ; and it 
thereby becomes impossible ever to reach its 
concrete reality, "the invisible and present 
soul." 

This intuitional coinage in fixed standard 
concepts, this creation of an easily handled 
intellectual cash, is no doubt of evident 
practical utility. For knowledge in the usual 
sense of the word is not a disinterested opera- 
tion ; it consists in finding out what profit 
we can draw from an object, how we are to 
conduct ourselves towards it, what label we 
can suitably attach to it, under what already 
known class it comes, to what degree it is 
deserving of this or that title which determines 
an attitude we must take up, or a step we 
must perform. Our end is to place the object 
in its approximate class, having regard to 
advantageous employment or to everyday 
language. Then, and only then, we find our 
pigeon-holes all ready-made ; and the same 
parcel of reagents meets all cases. A universal 
catechism is here in existence to meet every 
research ; its different clauses define so many 
unshifting points of view, from which we 



46 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

regard each object, and our study is subse- 
quently limited to applying a kind of nomen- 
clature to the preconstructed frames. 

Once again the philosopher has to proceed 
in exactly the opposite direction. He has 
not to confine himself to ready-made business 
concepts, of the ordinary kind, suits cut to an 
average model, which fit nobody because they 
almost fit everybody ; but he has to work to 
measure, incessantly renew his plant, con- 
tinually recreate his mind, and meet each new 
problem with a fresh adaptive effort. He 
must not go from concepts to things, as if 
each of them were only the cutting-point of 
several concurrent generalities, an ideal centre 
of intersecting abstractions ; on the contrary, 
he must go from things to concepts, incessantly 
creating new thoughts, and incessantly recast- 
ing the old. 

There could be no solution of the problem 
in a more or less ingenious mosaic or tessel- 
lation of rigid concepts, pre-existing to be 
employed. We need plastic fluid, supple and 
living concepts, capable of being continually 
modelled on reality, of delicately following its 
infinite curves. The philosopher's task is then 
to create concepts much more than to combine 
them. And each of the concepts he creates 



METHOD 47 

must remain open and adjustable, ready for 
the necessary renewal and adaptation, like a 
method or a programme : it must be the arrow 
pointing to a path which descends from in- 
tuition to language, not a boundary marking 
a terminus. In this way only does philosophy 
remain what it ought to be : the examination 
into the consciousness of the human mind, the 
effort towards enlargement and depth which it 
attempts unremittingly, in order to advance 
beyond its present intellectual condition. 

Do you want an example ? I will take that 
of human personality. The ego is one ; the 
ego is many : no one contests this double 
formula. But everything admits of it ; and 
what is its lesson to us ? Observe what is 
bound to happen to the two concepts of unity 
and multiplicity, by the mere fact that we 
take them for general frames independent of 
the reality contained, for detached language 
admitting empty and blank definition, always 
representable by the same word, no matter 
what the circumstances : they are no longer 
living and coloured ideas, but abstract, motion- 
less, and neutral forms, without shades or 
gradations, without distinction of case, char- 
acterising two points of view from which 
you can observe anything and everything. 



48 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

This being so, how could the application of 
these forms help us to grasp the original and 
peculiar nature of the unity and multiplicity 
of the ego ? Still further, how could we, 
between two such entities, statically defined 
by their opposition, ever imagine a synthesis ? 
Correctly speaking, the interesting question 
is not whether there is unity, multiplicity, 
combination, one with the other, but to see 
what sort of unity, multiplicity, or combina- 
tion realises the case in point ; above all, to 
understand how the living person is at once 
multiple unity and one multiplicity, how these 
two poles of conceptual dissociation are con- 
nected, how these two diverging branches of 
abstraction join at the roots. The interesting 
point, in a word, is not the two symbolical 
colourless marks indicating the two ends of 
the spectrum; it is the continuity between, 
with its changing wealth of colouring, and the 
double progress of shades which resolve it into 
red and violet. 

But it is impossible to arrive at this concrete 
transition unless we begin from direct intuition 
and descend to the analysing concepts. 

Again, the same duty of reversing our 
familiar attitude, of inverting our customary 
proceeding, becomes ours for another reason. 



METHOD 49 

The conceptual atomism of common thought 
leads it to place movement in a lower order 
than rest, fact in a lower order than becoming. 
According to common thought, movement is 
added to the atom, as a supplementary accident 
to a body previously at rest ; and, by becom- 
ing, the pre-existent terms are strung together 
like pearls on a necklace. It delights in rest, 
and endeavours to bring to rest all that moves. 
Immobility appears to it to be the base of 
existence. It decomposes and pulverises every 
change and every phenomenon, until it finds 
the invariable element in them. It is immo- 
bility which it esteems as primary, funda- 
mental, intelligible of itself; and motion, on 
the contrary, which it seeks to explain as a 
function of immobility. And so it tends, out 
of progresses and transitions, to make things. 
To see distinctly, it appears to need a dead 
halt. What indeed are concepts but logical 
look-out stations along the path of becoming ? 
what are they but motionless external views, 
taken at intervals, of an uninterrupted stream 
of movement ? 

Each of them isolates and fixes an aspect, 
"as the instantaneous lightning flashes on a 
storm-scene in the darkness." ' 

1 Matter and Memory, p. 209. 



50 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

Placed together, they make a net laid in ad- 
vance, a strong mesh work in which the human 
intelligence posts itself securely to spy the flux 
of reality, and seize it as it passes. Such a 
proceeding is made for the practical world, and 
is out of place in the speculative. Every- 
where we are trying to find constants, identities, 
non- variants, states ; and we imagine ideal 
science as an open eye which gazes for ever 
upon objects that do not move. The constant 
is the concrete support demanded by our 
action: the matter upon which we operate 
must not escape our grasp and slip through 
our hands, if we are to be able to work it. 
The constant, again, is the element of language, 
in which the word represents its inert perman- 
ence, in which it constitutes the solid fulcrum, 
the foundation and landmark of dialectic 
progress, being that which can be discarded 
by the mind, whose attention is thus free for 
other tasks. In this respect analysis by con- 
cepts is the natural method of common-sense. 
It consists in asking from time to time what 
point the object studied has reached, what it 
has become, in order to see what one could 
derive from it, or what it is fitting to say of it. 

But this method has only a practical reach. 
Reality, which in its essence is becoming, passes 



METHOD 51 

through our concepts without ever letting it- 
self be caught, as a moving body passes fixed 
points. When we filter it, we retain only its 
deposit, the result of the becoming drifted 
down to us. 

Do the dams, canals, and buoys make the 
current of the river ? Do the festoons of dead 
seaweed ranged along the sand make the 
rising tide ? Let us beware of confounding 
the stream of becoming with the sharp out- 
line of its result. Analysis by concepts is a 
cinematograph method, and it is plain that 
the inner organisation of the movement is not 
seen in the moving pictures. Every mo- 
ment we have fixed views of moving objects. 
With such conceptual sections taken in the 
stream of continuity, however many we ac- 
cumulate, should we ever reconstruct the 
movement itself, the dynamic connection, the 
march of the images, the transition from one 
view to another ? This capacity for movement 
must be contained in the picture apparatus, 
and must therefore be given in addition to 
the views themselves ; and nothing can better 
prove how, after all, movement is never ex- 
plicable except by itself, never grasped except 
in itself. 

But if we take movement as our principle, 



^sx 



52 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

it is, on the contrary, possible, and even easy, to 
slacken speed by imperceptible degrees, and 
stop dead. 

From a dead stop we shall never get our 
movement again ; but rest can very well be 
conceived as the limit of movement, as its 
arrest or extinction ; for rest is less than 
movement. 

In this way the true philosophical method, 
which is the inverse of the common method, 
consists in taking up a position from the very 
outset in the bosom of becoming, in adopting 
its changing curves and variable tension, in 
sympathising with the rhythm of its genesis, 
in perceiving all existence from within, as a 
growth, in following it in its inner generation ; 
in short, in promoting movement to funda- 
mental reality, and, inversely, in degrading 
fixed states to the rank of secondary and 
derived reality. 

And thus, to come back to the example of 
the human personality, the philosopher must 
seek in the ego not so much a ready-made 
unity or multiplicity as, if I may venture the 
expression, two antagonistic and correlative 
movements of unification and plwification. 

There is then a radical difference between 
philosophic intuition and conceptual analysis. 



METHOD 53 

The latter delights in the play of dialectic, in 
fountains of knowledge, where it is interested 
only in the immovable basins ; the former goes 
back to the source of the concepts, and seeks 
to possess it where it gushes out. Analysis 
cuts the channels ; intuition supplies the water. 
Intuition acquires and analysis expends. 

It is not a question of banning analysis ; 
science could not do without it, and philosophy 
could not do without science. But we must 
reserve for it its normal place and its just task. 

Concepts are the deposited sediment of in- 
tuition : intuition produces the concepts, not 
the concepts intuition. From the heart of 
intuition you will have no difficulty in seeing 
how it splits up and analyses into concepts, 
concepts of such and such a kind or such and 
such a shade. But by successive analyses you 
will never reconstruct the least intuition, just 
as, no matter how you distribute the water, 
you will never reconstruct the reservoir in its 
original condition. 

Begin from intuition : it is a summit from 
which we can descend by infinite slopes ; it is 
a picture which we can place in an infinite 
number of frames. But all the frames together 
will not recompose the picture, and the lower 
ends of all the slopes will not explain how they 



, 



54 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

meet at the summit. Intuition is a necessary 
beginning; it is the impulse which sets the 
analysis in motion, and gives it direction ; it is 
the sounding which brings it to solid bottom ; 
the soul which assures its unity. " I shall never 
understand how black and white interpenetrate, 
if I have not seen grey, but I understand with- 
out trouble, after once seeing grey, how we 
can regard it from the double point of view of 
black and white." 1 

Here are some letters which you can arrange 
in chains in a thousand ways : the indivisible 
sense running along the chain, and making 
one phrase of it, is the original cause of the 
writing, not its consequence. Thus it is with 
intuition in relation to analysis. But begin- 
nings and generative activities are the proper 
object of the philosopher. Thus the conversion 
and reform incumbent on him consist essentially 
in a transition from the analytic to the intuitive 
point of view. 

The result is that the chosen instrument 
of philosophic thought is metaphor ; and of 
metaphor we know Mr Bergson to be an in- 
comparable master. What we have to do, he 
says himself, is "to elicit a certain active force 
which in most men is liable to be trammelled 

1 Introduction to Metaphysics. 



METHOD 55 

by mental habits more useful to life," to 
awaken in them the feeling of the immediate, 
original, and concrete. But "many different 
images, borrowed from very different orders of 
things, can, by their convergent action, direct 
consciousness to the precise point where there 
is a certain intuition to be seized. By choosing 
images as unlike as possible, we prevent any 
one of them from usurping the place of the 
intuition it is intended to call up, since it 
would in that case be immediately routed by 
its rivals. In making them all, despite their 
different aspects, demand of our mind the 
same kind of attention, and in some way the 
same degree of tension, we accustom our con- 
sciousness little by little to a quite peculiar 
and well-determined disposition, precisely the 
one which it ought to adopt to appear to itself 
unmasked." l 

Strictly speaking, the intuition of immediacy 
is inexpressible. But it can be suggested and 
called up. How ? By ringing it round with 
concurrent metaphors. Our aim is to modify 
the habits of imagination in ourselves which 
are opposed to a simple and direct view, to 
break through the mechanical imagery in 
which we have allowed ourselves to be caught ; 

1 Introduction to Metaphysics. 



56 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

and it is by awakening other imagery and 
other habits that we can succeed in so doing. 

But then, you will say, where is the difference 
between philosophy and art, between meta- 
physical and aesthetic intuition? Art also 
tends to reveal nature to us, to suggest to us 
a direct vision of it, to lift the veil of illusion 
which hides us from ourselves ; and aesthetic 
intuition is, in its own way, perception of 
immediacy. We revive the feeling of reality 
obliterated by habit, we summon the deep and 
penetrating soul of things: the object is the 
same in both cases ; and the means are also 
the same; images and metaphors. Is Mr 
Bergson only a poet, and does his work 
amount to nothing but the introduction of 
impressionism in metaphysics? 

It is an old objection. If the truth be told, 
Mr Bergson's immense scientific knowledge 
should be sufficient refutation. 

Only those who have not read the mass of 
carefully proved and positive discussions could 
give way thus to the impressions of art awakened 
by what is truly a magic style. But we can go 
further and put it better. 

That there are analogies between philosophy 
and art, between metaphysical and aesthetic 
intuition, is unquestionable and uncontested. 



METHOD 57 

At the same time, the analogies must not be 
allowed to hide the differences. 

Art is, to a certain extent, philosophy 
previous to analysis, previous to criticism and 
science ; the aesthetic intuition is metaphysical 
intuition in process of birth, bounded by dream, 
not proceeding to the test of positive verifica- 
tion. Reciprocally, philosophy is the art which 
follows upon science, and takes account of it, 
the art which uses the results of analysis as its 
material, and submits itself to the demands 
of stern criticism ; metaphysical intuition is 
the aesthetic intuition verified, systematised, 
ballasted by the language of reason. 

Philosophy then differs from art in two 
essential points : first of all, it rests upon, 
envelops, and supposes science ; secondly, it 
implies a test of verification in its strict 
meaning. Instead of stopping at the acts 
of common-sense, it completes them with all 
the contributions of analysis and scientific 
investigation. 

We said just now of common-sense that, in 
its inmost depths, it possesses reality : that is 
only quite exact when we mean common-sense 
developed in positive science ; and that is why 
philosophy takes the results of science as its 
basis, for each of these results, like the facts 



58 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

and data of common perception, opens a way 
for critical penetration towards the immediate. 
Just now I was comparing the two kinds of 
knowledge which the theorist and the engineer 
can have of a machine, and I allowed the 
advantage of absolute knowledge to practical 
experience, whilst theory seemed to me mainly 
relative to the constructive industry. That is 
true, and I do not go back upon it. But the 
most experienced engineer, who did not know 
the mechanism of his machine, who possessed 
only unanalysed feelings about it, would have 
only an artist's, not a philosopher's knowledge. 
For absolute intuition, in the full sense of the 
word, we must have integral experience ; that 
is to say, a living application of rational theory 
no less than of working technique. 

To journey towards living intuition, starting 
from complete science and complete sensation, 
is the philosopher's task ; and this task is 
governed by standards unknown to art. 

Metaphysical intuition offers a victorious re- 
sistance to the test of thorough and continued 
experiment, to the test of calculation as to 
that of working, to the complete experiment 
which brings into play all the various deoxidis- 
ing agents of criticism ; it shows itself capable 
of withstanding analysis without dissolving or 



. 



METHOD 59 

succumbing; it abounds in concepts which 
satisfy the understanding, and exalt it ; in a 
word, it creates light and truth on all mental 
planes ; and these characteristics are sufficient 
to distinguish it in a profound degree from 
aesthetic intuition. 

The latter is only the prophetic type of the 
former, a dream or presentiment, a veiled and 
still uncertain dawn, a twilight myth preceding 
and proclaiming, in the half-darkness, the full 
day of positive revelation. . . . 

Every philosophy has two faces, and must 
be studied in two movements — method and 
teaching. 

These are its two moments, its two aspects, 
no doubt co-ordinate and mutually dependent, 
but none the less distinct. 

We have just examined the method of the 
new philosophy inaugurated by Mr Bergson. 
To what teaching has this method led us, and 
to what can we foresee that it will lead us ? 

This is what we have still to find. 



II 

TEACHING 

The sciences properly so called, those that 
are by agreement termed positive, present 
themselves as so many external and circum- 
ferential points from which we view reality. 
They leave us on the outside of things, and 
confine themselves to investigating from a 
distance. 

The views they give us resemble the brief 
perspectives of a town which we obtain in 
looking at it from different angles on the 
surrounding hills. 

Less even than that : for very soon, by in- 
creasing abstraction, the coloured views give 
place to regular lines, and even to simple con- 
ventional notes, which are more practical in 
use and waste less time. And so the sciences 
remain prisoners of the symbol, and all the 
inevitable relativity involved in its use. But 
philosophy claims to pierce within reality, 
establish itself in the object, follow its thousand 

60 



TEACHING 61 

turns and folds, obtain from it a direct and 
immediate feeling, and penetrate right into the 
concrete depths of its heart ; it is not content 
with an analysis, but demands an intuition. 

Now there is one existence which, at the 
outset, we know better and more surely than 
any other ; there is a privileged case in which 
the effort of sympathetic revelation is natural 
and almost easy to us ; there is one reality at 
least which we grasp from within, which we 
perceive in its deep and internal content. 
This reality is ourselves. It is typical of all 
reality, and our study may fitly begin here. 
Psychology puts us in direct contact with it, 
and metaphysics attempt to generalise this 
contact. But such a generalisation can only 
be attempted if, to begin with, we are familiar 
with reality at the point where we have 
immediate access to it. 

The path of thought which the philosopher 
must take is from the inner to the outer being. 



"Know thyself": the old maxim has re- 
mained the motto of philosophy since Socrates, 
the motto at least which marks its initial 
moment, when, inclining towards the depth 



62 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

of the subject, it commences its true work of 
penetration, whilst science continues to extend 
on the surface. Each philosophy in turn has 
commented upon and applied this old motto. 
But Mr Bergson, more than anyone else, has 
given it, as he does everything else he takes 
up, a new and profound meaning. What 
was the current interpretation before him? 
Speaking only of the last century, we may say 
that, under the influence of Kant, criticism 
had till now been principally engaged in un- 
ravelling the contribution of the subject in the 
act of consciousness, in establishing our per- 
ception of things through certain representative 
forms borrowed from our own constitution. 
Such was, even yesterday, the authenticated 
way of regarding the problem. And it is 
precisely this attitude which Mr Bergson, by 
a volte-face which will remain familiar to him 
in the course of his researches, reverses from 
the outset. 

"It has appeared to me," says he, 1 "that 
there was ground for setting oneself the inverse 
problem, and asking whether the most apparent 
states of the ego itself, which we think we 
grasp directly, are not most of the time per- 
ceived through certain forms borrowed from 

1 Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Conclusion. 



TEACHING 63 

the outer world, which in this way gives us 
back what we have lent it. A priori, it seems 
fairly probable that this is what goes on. For 
supposing that the forms of which we are 
speaking, to which we adapt matter, come 
entirely from the mind, it seems difficult to 
apply them constantly to objects without soon 
producing the colouring of the objects in the 
forms ; therefore in using these forms for the 
knowledge of our own personality, we risk 
taking a reflection of the frame in which we 
place them — that is, actually, the external 
world — for the very colouring of the ego. But 
we can go further, and state that forms appli- 
cable to things cannot be entirely our own 
work ; that they must result from a com- 
promise between matter and mind ; that if 
we give much to this matter, we doubtless 
receive something from it ; and that, in this 
way, when we try to possess ourselves again 
after an excursion into the outer world, we no 
longer have our hands free." 

To avoid such a consequence, there is, we 
must admit, a conceivable loophole. It con- 
sists in maintaining on principle an absolute 
analogy, an exact similitude between internal 
reality and external objects. The forms which 
suit the one would then also suit the other. 



64 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

But it must be observed that such a principle 
constitutes in the highest degree a metaphysical 
thesis which it would be on all hands illegal 
to assert previously as a postulate of method. 
Secondly, and above all, it must be observed 
that on this head experience is decisive, and 
manifests more plainly every day the failure 
of the theories which try to assimilate the 
world of consciousness to that of matter, to 
copy psychology from physics. We have here 
two different "orders." The apparatus of the 
first does not admit of being employed in the 
second. Hence the necessity of the attitude 
adopted by Mr Bergson. We have an effort 
to make, a work of reform to undertake, to 
lift the veil of symbols which envelops our 
usual representation of the ego, and thus con- 
ceals us from our own view, in order to find 
out what we are in reality, immediately, in our 
inmost selves. This effort and this work are 
necessary, because, "in order to contemplate 
the ego in its original purity, psychology must 
eliminate or correct certain forms which bear 
the visible mark of the outer world." 1 What 
are these forms ? Let us confine ourselves to 
the most important. Things appear to us as 
numerable units, placed side by side in space. 

1 Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Conclusion. 



TEACHING 65 

They compose numerical and spatial multi- 
plicity, a dust of terms between which 
geometrical ties are established. 

But space and number are the two forms 
of immobility, the two schemes of analysis, 
by which we must not let ourselves be ob- 
sessed. I do not say that there is no place 
to give them, even in the internal world. But 
the more deeply we enter into the heart of 
psychological life, the less they are in place. 

The fact is, there are several planes of 
consciousness, situated at different depths, 
marking all the intervening degrees between 
pure thought and bodily action, and each 
mental phenomenon interests all these planes 
simultaneously, and is thus repeated in a 
thousand higher tones, like the harmonies of 
one and the same note. 

Or, if you prefer it, the life of the spirit is 

not the uniform transparent surface of a mere ; 

rather it is a gushing spring which, at first 

pent in, spreads upwards and outwards, like a 

sheaf of corn, passing through many different 

states, from the dark and concentrated welling 

of the source to the gleam of the scattered 

tumbling spray ; and each of its moods presents 

in its turn a similar character, being itself only 

a thread within the whole. Such without 

5 



66 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

doubt is the central and activating idea of the 
admirable book entitled Matter and Memory. 
I cannot possibly condense its substance here, 
or convey its astonishing synthetic power, 
which succeeds in contracting a complete 
metaphysic, and in gripping it so firmly that 
the examination ends by passing to the dis- 
cussion of a few humble facts relative to the 
philosophy of the brain ! But its technical 
severity and its very conciseness, combined 
with the wealth it contains, render it irresum- 
able ; and I can only in a few words indicate 
its conclusions. 

First of all, however little we pride ourselves 
on positive method, we must admit the exist- 
ence of an internal world, of a spiritual activity 
distinct from matter and its mechanism. No 
chemistry of the brain, no dance of atoms, is 
equivalent to the least thought, or indeed to 
the least sensation. 

Some, it is true, have brought forward a 
thesis of parallelism, according to which each 
mental phenomenon corresponds point by 
point to a phenomenon in the brain, without 
adding anything to it, without influencing its 
course, merely translating it into another 
tongue, so that a glance sufficiently penetrat- 
ing to follow the molecular revolutions and 



TEACHING 67 

the fluxes of nervous production in their least 
episodes would immediately read the inmost 
secrets of the associated consciousness. 

But no one will deny that a thesis of this 
kind is only in reality a hypothesis, that it 
goes enormously beyond the certain data of 
current biology, and that it can only be 
formulated by anticipating future discoveries 
in a preconceived direction. Let us be candid : 
it is not really a thesis of positive science, but 
a metaphysical thesis in the unpleasant meaning 
of the term. Taking it at its best, its worth 
to-day could only be one of intelligibleness. 
And intelligible it is not. 

How are we to understand a consciousness 
destitute of activity and consequently without 
connection with reality, a kind of phosphor- 
escence which emphasises the lines of vibration 
in the brain, and renders in miraculous dupli- 
cate, by its mysterious and useless light, certain 
phenomena already complete without it ? 

One day Mr Bergson came down into the 
arena of dialectic, and, talking to his opponents 
in their own language, pulled their " psycho- 
physiological paralogism" to pieces before 
their eyes ; it is only by confounding in one 
and the same argument two systems of incom- 
patible notations, idealism and realism, that 



68 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

we succeed in enunciating the parallelist thesis. 
This reasoning went home, all the more as it 
was adapted to the usual form of discussions 
between philosophers. But a more positive 
and more categorical proof is to be found all 
through Matter and Memory. From the pre- 
cise example of recollection analysed to its 
lowest depths, Mr Bergson completely grasps 
and measures the divergence between soul 
and body, between mind and matter. Then, 
putting into practice what he said elsewhere 
about the creation of new concepts, he arrives 
at the conclusion — these are his own ex- 
pressions — that between the psychological 
fact and its counterpart in the brain there 
must be a relation sui generis, which is 
neither the determination of the one by the 
other, nor their reciprocal independence, nor 
the production of the latter by the former, 
nor of the former by the latter, nor their 
simple parallel concomitance ; in short, a 
relation which answers to none of the ready- 
made concepts which abstraction puts at our 
service, but which may be approximately 
formulated in these terms : 1 

" Given a psychological state, that part of 

1 Report of the French Philosophical Society, meeting, 
2nd May 1901. 



TEACHING 69 

the state which admits of play, the part which 
would be translated by an attitude of the body 
or by bodily actions, is represented in the brain ; 
the remainder is independent of it, and has 
no equivalent in the brain. So that to one and 
the same state of the brain there may be many 
different psychological states which correspond, 
though not all kinds of states. They are 
psychological states which all have in common 
the same motor scheme. Into one and the 
same frame many pictures may go, but not 
all pictures. Let us take a lofty abstract 
philosophical thought. We do not conceive 
it without adding to it an image representing 
it, w T hich we place beneath. 

"We do not represent the image to ourselves, 
again, without supporting it by a design which 
resumes its leading features. We do not 
imagine this design itself without imagining 
and, in so doing, sketching certain movements 
which would reproduce it. It is this sketch, 
and this sketch only, which is represented 
in the brain. Frame the sketch, there is 
a margin for the image. Frame the image 
again, there remains a margin, and a still 
larger margin, for the thought. The thought 
is thus relatively free and indeterminate in 
relation to the activity which conditions it in 



70 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

the brain, for this activity expresses only the 
motive articulation of the idea, and the arti- 
culation may be the same for ideas absolutely 
different. And yet it is not complete liberty 
nor absolute indetermination, since any kind of 
idea, taken at hazard, would not present the 
articulation desired. 

" In short, none of the simple concepts 
furnished us by philosophy could express the 
relation we seek, but this relation appears 
with tolerable clearness to result from ex- 
periment." 

The same analysis of facts tells us how the 
planes of consciousness, of which I spoke just 
now, are arranged, the law by which they are 
distributed, and the meaning which attaches 
to their disposition. Let us neglect the 
intervening multiples, and look only at the 
extreme poles of the series. 

We are inclined to imagine too abrupt a 
severance between gesture and dream, between 
action and thought, between body and mind. 
There are not two plane surfaces, without 
thickness or transition, placed one above the 
other on different levels ; it is by an imper- 
ceptible degradation of increasing depth, and 
decreasing materiality, that we pass from one 
term to the other. 



TEACHING 71 

And the characteristics are continually 
changing in the course of the transition. 
Thus our initial problem confronts us again, 
more acutely than ever : are the forms of 
number and space equally suitable on all 
planes of consciousness? 

Let us consider the most external of these 
planes of life, the one which is in contact with 
the outer world, the one which receives directly 
the impressions of external reality. We live 
as a rule on the surface of ourselves, in the 
numerical and spatial dispersion of language 
and gesture. Our deeper ego is covered as it 
were with a tough crust, hardened in action : 
it is a skein of motionless and numerable 
habits, side by side, and of distinct and solid 
things, with sharp outlines and mechanical 
relations. And it is for the representation of 
the phenomena which occur within this dead 
rind that space and number are valid. 

For we have to live, I mean live our 
common daily life, with our body, with our 
customary mechanism rather than with our 
true depths. Our attention is therefore most 
often directed by a natural inclination to the 
practical worth and useful function of our 
internal states, to the public object of which 
they are the sign, to the effect they produce ex- 



72 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

ternally, to the gestures by which we express 
them in space. A social average of individual 
modalities interests us more than the incom- 
municable originality of our deeper life. The 
words of language besides offer us so many 
symbolic centres round which crystallise groups 
of motor mechanisms set up by habit, the only 
usual elements of our internal determinations. 
Now, contact with society has rendered these 
motor mechanisms practically identical in all 
men. Hence, whether it be a question of sen- 
sation, feeling, or ideas, we have these neutral 
dry and colourless residua, which spread life- 
less over the surface of ourselves, " like dead 
leaves on the water of a pond." * 

Thus the progress we have lived falls into 
the rank of a thing that can be handled. Space 
and number lay hold of it. And soon all that 
remains of what was movement and life is 
combinations formed and annulled, and forces 
mechanically composed in a whole of juxta- 
posed atoms, and to represent this whole a 
collection of petrified concepts, manipulated 
in dialectic like counters. 

Quite different appears the true inner reality, 
and quite different are its profound character- 
istics. To begin with, it contains nothing 

1 Essay on the Immediate Data, p. 102. 



TEACHING 73 

quantitative ; the intensity of a psychological 
state is not a magnitude, nor can it be measured. 
The Essay on the Immediate Data of Conscious- 
ness begins with the proof of this leading 
statement. If it is a question of a simple 
state, such as a sensation of light or weight, 
the intensity is measured by a certain quality 
of shade which indicates to us approximately, 
by an association of ideas and thanks to our 
acquired experience, the magnitude of the 
objective cause from which it proceeds. If, 
on the contrary, it is a question of a complex 
state, such as those impressions of profound 
joy or sorrow which lay hold of us entirely, 
invading and overwhelming us, what we call 
their intensity expresses only the confused 
feeling of a qualitative progress, and increasing 
wealth. " Take, for example, an obscure desire, 
which has gradually become a profound passion. 
You will see that the feeble intensity of this 
desire consisted first of all in the fact that it 
seemed to you isolated and in a way foreign 
to all the rest of your inner life. But little by 
little it penetrated a larger number of psychic 
elements, dyeing them, so to speak, its own 
colour ; and now you find your point of view 
on things as a whole appears to you to have 
changed. Is it not true that you become aware 



74 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

of a profound passion, once it has taken 
root, by the fact that the same objects no 
longer produce the same impression upon 
you? All your sensations, all your ideas, 
appear to you refreshed by it ; it is like a 
new childhood." 1 

There is here none of the homogeneity which 
is the property of magnitude, and the necessary 
condition of measurement, giving a view of 
the less in the bosom of the more. The ele- 
ment of number has vanished, and with it 
numerical multiplicity extended in space. 
Our inner states form a qualitative continuity ; 
they are prolonged and blended into one 
another ; they are grouped in harmonies, each 
note of which contains an echo of the whole ; 
they are encircled by an innumerable degrada- 
tion of halos, which gradually colour the total 
content of consciousness ; they live each in 
the bosom of his fellow. 

" I am the scent of roses," were the words 
Condillac put in the mouth of his statue ; and 
these words translate the immediate truth 
exactly, as soon as observation becomes naive 
and simple enough to attain pure fact. In a 
passing breath I breathe my childhood ; in the 
rustle of leaves, in a ray of moonlight, I find 

1 Loc. cit. y p. 6, 



TEACHING 75 

an infinite series of reflections and dreams. 
A thought, a feeling, an act, may reveal a 
complete soul. My ideas, my sensations, are 
like me. How would such facts be possible, 
if the multiple unity of the ego did not present 
the essential characteristic of vibrating in its 
entirety in the depths of each of the parts 
descried or rather determined in it by analysis ? 
All psychical determinations envelop and 
imply each other reciprocally. And the fact 
that the soul is thus present in its entirety in 
each of its acts, its feelings, for example, or its 
ideas in its sensations, its recollections in its 
percepts, its inclinations in its obvious states, 
is the justifying principle of metaphors, the 
source of all poetry, the truth which modern 
philosophy proclaims with more force every 
day under the name of immanence of thought, 
the fact which explains our moral responsibility 
with regard to our affections and our beliefs 
themselves ; and finally, it is the best of us, 
since it is this which ensures our being able 
to surrender ourselves, genuinely and unre- 
servedly, and this which constitutes the real 
unity of our person. 

Let us push still further into the hidden 
retreat of the soul. Here w r e are in these 
regions of twilight and dream, where our ego 



76 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

takes shape, where the spring within us 
gushes up, in the warm secrecy of the dark- 
ness which ushers our trembling being into 
birth. Distinctions fail us. Words are useless 
now. We hear the wells of consciousness at 
their mysterious task like an invisible shiver 
of running water through the mossy shadow 
of the caves. I dissolve in the joy of becom- 
ing. I abandon myself to the delight of being 
a pulsing reality. I no longer know whether 
1 see scents, breathe sounds, or smell colours. 
Do I love ? Do I think ? The question has 
no longer a meaning for me. I am, in my 
complete self, each of my attitudes, each of 
my changes. It is not my sight which is 
indistinct or my attention which is idle. It is 
I who have resumed contact with pure reality, 
whose essential movement admits no form of 
number. He who thus makes the really 
"deep" and " inner" effort necessary to be- 
coming — were it only for an elusive moment 
— discovers, under the simplest appearance, 
inexhaustible sources of unsuspected wealth ; 
the rhythm of his duration becomes amplified 
and refined ; his acts become more conscious ; 
and in what seemed to him at first sudden 
severance or instantaneous pulsation he dis- 
covers complex transitions imperceptibly 



TEACHING 77 

shaded off, musical transitions full of unex- 
pected repetitions and threaded movements. 

Thus, the deeper we go in consciousness, 
the less suitable become these schemes of 
separation and fixity existing in spatial and 
numerical forms. The inner world is that of 
pure quality. There is no measurable homo- 
geneity, no collection of atomically constructed 
elements. The phenomena distinguished in 
it by analysis are not composing units, but 
phases. And it is only when they reach the 
surface, when they come in contact with the 
external world, when they are incarnated in 
language or gesture, that the categories of 
matter become adapted to them. In its true 
nature, reality appears as an uninterrupted flow, 
an impalpable shiver of fluid changing tones, 
a perpetual flux of waves which ebb and break 
and dissolve into one another without shock 
or jar. Everything is ceaseless change ; and 
the state which appears the most stable is 
already change, since it continues and grows 
old. Constant quantities are represented only 
by the materialisation of habit or by means of 
practical symbols. And it is on this point 
that Mr Bergson rightly insists. 1 

"The apparent discontinuity of psycho- 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 3. 



78 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

logical life is due, then, to the fact that our 
attention is concentrated on it in a series of 
discontinuous acts ; where there is only a 
gentle slope, we think we see, when we follow 
the broken line of our attention, the steps of 
a staircase. It is true that our psychological 
life is full of surprises. A thousand incidents 
arise which seem to contrast with what pre- 
cedes them, and not to be connected with what 
follows. But the gap in their appearances 
stands out against the continuous background 
on which they are represented, and to which 
they owe the very intervals that separate them ; 
they are the drumbeats which break into 
the symphony at intervals. Our attention is 
fixed upon them because they interest it 
more, but each of them proceeds from the 
fluid mass of our entire psychological exist- 
ence. Each of them is only the brightest 
point in a moving zone which understands all 
that we feel, think, wish ; in fact, all that we 
are at a given moment. It is this zone which 
really constitutes our state. But we may 
observe that states defined in this way are not 
distinct elements. They are an endless stream 
of mutual continuity." 

And do not think that perhaps such a 
description represents only or principally our 



TEACHING 79 

life of feeling. Reason and thought share the 
same characteristic, as soon as we penetrate 
their living depth, whether it be a question of 
creative invention or of those primordial judg- 
ments which direct our activity. If they 
evidence greater stability, it is in permanence 
of direction, because our past remains present 
to us. 

For we are endowed with memory, and that 
perhaps is, on the whole, our most profound 
characteristic. It is by memory we enlarge 
ourselves and draw continually upon the 
wealth of our treasuries. Hence comes the 
completely original nature of the change which 
constitutes us. But it is here that we must 
shake off familiar representations ! Common- 
sense cannot think in terms of movement. It 
forges a static conception of it, and destroys 
it by arresting it under pretext of seeing 
it better. To define movement as a series 
of positions, with a generating law, with a 
time-table or correspondence sheet between 
places and times, is surely a ready-made pre- 
sentation. Are we not confusing the trajectory 
and its performance, the points traversed and 
the traversing of the points, the result of the 
genesis and the genesis of the result ; in short, 
the quantitative distance over which the flight 



80 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

extends, and the qualitative flight which puts 
this distance behind it ? In this way the very 
mobility which is the essence of movement 
vanishes. There is the same common mistake 
about time. Analytic and synthetic thought 
can see in time only a string of coincidences, 
each of them instantaneous, a logical series of 
relations. It imagines the whole of it to be 
a graduated slide-rule, in which the luminous 
point called the present is the geometrical 
index. 

Thus it gives form to time in space, "a 
kind of fourth dimension," 1 or at least it 
reduces it to nothing more than an abstract 
scheme of succession, "a stream without 
bottom or sides, flowing without determinable 
strength, in an indefinable direction." 2 It 
requires time to be homogeneous, and every 
homogeneous medium is space, " for as homo- 
geneity consists here in the absence of any 
quality, it is not clear how two forms of 
homogeneity could be distinguished one from 
the other." 8 

Quite different appears real duration, the 
duration which is lived. It is pure hetero- 

1 Essay on the Immediate Data. 

2 Introduction to Metaphysics. 

3 Essay on the Immediate Data, p. 74. 



TEACHING 81 

geneity. It contains a thousand different 
degrees of tension or relaxation, and its rhythm 
varies without end. The magic silence of 
calm nights or the wild disorder of a tempest, 
the still joy of ecstasy or the tumult of passion 
unchained, a steep climb towards a difficult 
truth or a gentle descent from a luminous 
principle to consequences which easily follow, 
a moral J crisis or a shooting pain, call up 
intuitions admitting no comparison with one 
another. We have here no series of moments, 
but prolonged and interpenetrating phases ; 
their sequence is not a substitution of one 
point for another, but rather resembles a 
musical resolution of harmony into harmony. 
And of this ever-new melody which constitutes 
our inner life every moment contains a reson- 
ance or an echo of past moments. " What 
are we really, what is our character, except 
the condensation of the history which we have 
lived since our birth, even before our birth, 
since we bring with us our prenatal dis- 
positions ? Without doubt we think only 
with a small part of our past ; but it is with 
our complete past, including our original bias 
of soul, that we desire, wish, and act." * This is 
what makes our duration irreversible, and its 

1 Creative Evolution, pp. 5-6. 

6 



82 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

novelty perpetual, for each of the states 
through which it passes envelops the recollec- 
tion of all past states. And thus we see, in 
the end, how, for a being endowed with 
memory, " existence consists in change, change 
in ripening, ripening in endless self-creation." 1 

With this formula we face the capital problem 
in which psychology and metaphysics meet, 
that of liberty. The solution given by Mr 
Bergson marks one of the culminating points 
of his philosophy. It is from this summit that 
he finds light thrown on the riddle of inner 
being. And it is the centre where all the lines 
of his research converge. 

What is liberty? What must we under- 
stand by this word? Beware of the answer 
you are going to give. Every definition, in 
the strict sense of the term, will imply the 
determinist thesis in advance, since, under 
pain of going round in a circle, it will be bound 
to express liberty as a function of what it is 
not. Either psychological liberty is an illusive 
appearance, or, if it is real, we can only grasp 
it by intuition, not by analysis, in the light of 
an immediate feeling. For a reality is verified, 
not constructed ; and we are now or never in 
one of those situations where the philosopher's 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 8. 



TEACHING 83 

task is to create some new concept, instead 
of abiding by a combination of previous 
elements. 

Man is free, says common-sense, in so far as 
his action depends only on himself. " We are 
free," says Mr Bergson, 1 " when our acts pro- 
ceed from our entire personality, when they 
express it, when they exhibit that indefinable 
resemblance to it which we find occasionally 
between the artist and his work." That is all 
we need seek; two conceptions which are 
equivalent to each other, two concordant 
formulae. It is true that this amounts to 
determining the free act by its very originality, 
in the etymological sense of the word : which 
is at bottom only another way of declaring 
it incommensurable with every concept, and 
reluctant to be confined by any definition. 
But, after all, is not that the only true immedi- 
ate fact ? 

That our spiritual life is genuine action, 
capable of independence, initiative, and irre- 
ducible novelty, not mere result produced 
from outside, not simple extension of external 
mechanism, that it is so much ours as to 
constitute every moment, for him who can 
see, an essentially incomparable and new 

1 Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, p. 131. 



84 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

invention, is exactly what represents for us 
the name of liberty. Understood thus, and 
decidedly it is like this that we must under- 
stand it, liberty is a profound thing : we seek 
it only in those moments of high and solemn 
choice which come into our life, not in the 
petty familiar actions which their very insigni- 
ficance submits to all surrounding influences, 
to every wandering breeze. Liberty is rare ; 
many live and die and have never known it. 
Liberty is a thing which contains an infinite 
number of degrees and shades ; it is measured 
by our capacity for the inner life. Liberty is a 
thing which goes on in us unceasingly : our 
liberty is potential rather than actual. And 
lastly, it is a thing of duration, not of space 
and number, not the work of moments or 
decrees. The free act is the act which has been 
long in preparing, the act which is heavy with 
our whole history, and falls like a ripe fruit 
from our past life. 

But how are we to establish positive verifica- 
tion of these views ? How are we to do away 
with the danger of illusion? The proof will 
in this case result from a criticism of adverse 
theories, along with direct observation of 
psychological reality freed from the deceptive 
forms which warp the common perception of 



TEACHING 85 

it. And it will here be an easy task to resume 
Mr Bergson's reasoning in a few words. 

The first obstacle which confronts affirma- 
tion of our liberty comes from physical de- 
terminism. Positive science, we are told, 
presents the universe to us as an immense 
homogeneous transformation, maintaining an 
exact equivalence between departure and 
arrival. How can we possibly have after that 
the genuine creation which we require in the 
act we call free ? 

The answer is that the universality of the 
mechanism is at bottom only a hypothesis 
which is still awaiting demonstration. On 
the one hand it includes the parallelist con- 
ception which we have recognised as effete. 
And on the other it is plain that it is not 
self-sufficient. At least it requires that some- 
where or other there should be a principle of 
position giving once for all what will after- 
wards be maintained. In actual fact, the 
course of phenomena displays three tendencies : 
a tendency to conservation, beyond question ; 
but also a tendency to collapse, as in the 
diminution of energy ; and a tendency to 
progress, as in biological evolution. To make 
conservation the sole law of matter implies an 
arbitrary decree, denoting only those aspects 



86 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

of reality which will count for anything. By 
what right do we thus exclude, with vital 
effort, even the feeling of liberty which in us 
is so vigorous ? 

We might say, it is true, that our spiritual 
life, if it is not a simple extension of external 
mechanism, yet proceeds according to an inter- 
nal mechanism equally severe, but of a different 
order. This would bring us to the hypothesis 
of a kind of psychological mechanism ; and in 
many respects this seems to be the common- 
sense hypothesis. I need not dwell upon it, 
after the numerous criticisms already made. 
Inner reality — which does not admit number 
— is not a sequence of distinct terms, allowing 
a disconnected waste of absolute causality. 

And the mechanism of which we dream has 
no true sense — for, after all, it has a sense — 
except in relation to the superficial phenomena 
which take place in our dead rind, in relation 
to the automaton which we are in daily life. 
I am ready to admit that it explains our 
common actions, but here it is our profound 
consciousness which is in question, not the 
play of our materialised habits. 

Without insisting, then, too strongly on this 
mongrel conception, let us pass to the direct 
examination of inner psychological reality. 



TEACHING 87 

Everything is ready for the conclusion. Our 
duration, which is continually accumulating 
itself, and always introducing some irreducible 
new factor, prevents any kind of state, even 
if superficially identical, from repeating itself 
in depth. "We shall never again have the 
soul we had this evening." Each of our 
moments remains essentially unique. It is 
something new added to the surviving past ; 
not only new, but unable to be foreseen. 

For how can we speak of foresight which is 
not simple conjecture, how can we conceive 
an absolute extrinsic determination, when the 
act in birth only makes one with the finished 
sum of its conditions, when these conditions 
are complete only on the threshold of the 
action beginning, including the fresh and 
irreducible contribution added by its very 
date in our history ? We can only explain 
afterwards, we can only foresee when it is too 
late, in retrospect, when the accomplished 
action has fallen into the plan of matter. 

Thus our inner life is a work of enduring 
creation : of phases which mature slowly, 
and conclude at long intervals the decisive 
moments of emancipating discovery. Un- 
doubtedly matter is there, under the forms of 
habit, threatening us with automatism, seek- 



88 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

ing at every moment to devour us, stealing a 
march on us whenever we forget. But matter 
represents in us only the waste of existence, 
the mortal fall of weakened reality, the swoon 
of the creative action falling back inert ; while 
the depths of our being still pulse with the 
liberty which, in its true function, employs 
mechanism itself only as a means of action. 

Now, does not this conception make a 
singular exception of us in nature, an empire 
within an empire? That is the question we 
have yet to investigate. 

II 

We have just attempted to grasp what being 
is in ourselves ; and we have found that it is 
becoming, progress, and growth, that it is a 
creative process which never ceases to labour 
incessantly; in a word, that it is duration. 
Must we come to the same conclusion about 
external being, about existence in general ? 

Let us consider that external reality which 
is nearest us, our body. It is known to us 
both externally by our perceptions and inter- 
nally by our affections. It is then a privileged 
case for our inquiry. In addition, and by 
analogy, we shall at the same time study the 



TEACHING 89 

other living bodies which everyday induction 
shows us to be more or less like our own. 
What are the distinctive characteristics of 
these new realities ? Each of them possesses 
a genuine individuality to a far greater degree 
than inorganic objects ; whilst the latter are 
hardly limited at all except in relation to the 
needs of the former, and so do not constitute 
beings in themselves, the former evidence a 
powerful internal unity which is only further 
emphasised by their prodigious complication, 
and form wholes which are naturally complete. 
These wholes are not collections of juxtaposed 
parts : they are organisms ; that is to say, systems 
of connected functions, in which each detail 
implies the whole, and where the various 
elements interpenetrate. These organisms 
change and modify continually; we say of 
them not only that they are, but that they 
live ; and their life is mutability itself, a flight, 
a perpetual flux. This uninterrupted flight 
cannot in any way be compared to a geo- 
metrical movement ; it is a rhythmic succession 
of phases, each of which contains the resonance 
of all those which come before ; each state lives 
on in the state following ; the life of the body 
is memory ; the living being accumulates its 
past, makes a snowball of itself, serves as an 



90 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

open register for time, ripens, and grows old. 
Despite all resemblances, the living body always 
remains, in some measure, an absolutely original 
and unique invention, for there are not two 
specimens exactly alike ; and, among inert 
objects, it appears as the reservoir of indeter- 
mination, the centre of spontaneity, contin- 
gence, and genuine action, as if in the course 
of phenomena nothing really new could be 
produced except by its agency. 

Such are the characteristic tendencies of 
life, such the aspects which it presents to 
immediate observation. Whether spiritual 
activity unconsciously presides over biological 
evolution, or whether it simply prolongs it, 
we always find here and there the essential 
features of duration. 

But I spoke just now of "individuality." 
Is it really one of the distinctive marks of 
life? We know how difficult it is to define 
it accurately. Nowhere, not even in man, 
is it fully realised ; and there are beings in 
existence in which it seems a complete illusion, 
though every part of them reproduces their 
complete unity. 

True, but we are now dealing with biology, 
in which geometrical precision is inadmis- 
sible, where reality is defined not so much by 



TEACHING 91 

the possession of certain characteristics as by 
its tendency to accentuate them. It is as a 
tendency that individuality is more particularly 
manifested ; and if we look at it in this light, 
no one can deny that it does constitute one 
of the fundamental tendencies of life. Only 
the truth is that the tendency to individual- 
ity remains always and everywhere counter- 
balanced, and therefore limited, by an oppos- 
ing tendency, the tendency to association, and 
above all to reproduction. This necessitates 
a correction in our analysis. Nature, in many 
respects, seems to take no interest in indivi- 
duals. " Life appears to be a current passing 
from one germ to another through the medium 
of a developed organism." * 

It seems as if the organism played the part 
of a thoroughfare. What is important is 
rather the continuity of progress of which 
the individuals are only transitory phases. 
Between these phases again there are no sharp 
severances ; each phase resolves and melts 
imperceptibly into that which follows. Is 
not the real problem of heredity to know 
how, and up to what point, a new individual 
breaks away from the individuals which pro- 
duced it ? Is not the real mystery of heredity 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 29. 



92 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

the difference, not the resemblance, occurring 
between one term and another ? 

Whatever be its solution, all the individual 
phases mutually extend and interpenetrate 
one another. There is a racial memory by 
which the past is continually accumulated and 
preserved. Life's history is embodied in its 
present. And that is really the ultimate reason 
of the perpetual novelty which surprised us 
just now. The characteristics of biological 
evolution are thus the same as those of human 
progress. Once again we find the very stuff 
of reality in duration. " We must not then 
speak any longer of life in general as an abstrac- 
tion, or a mere heading under which we write 
down all living beings." 1 On the contrary, to 
it belongs the primordial function of reality. 
It is a very real current transmitted from 
generation to generation, organising and pass- 
ing through bodies, without failing or becom- 
ing exhausted in any one of them. 

We may already, then, draw one conclusion : 
Reality, at bottom, is becoming. But such a 
thesis runs counter to all our familiar ideas. 
It is imperative that we should submit it to 
the test of critical examination and positive 
verification. 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 28. 



TEACHING 93 

One system of metaphysics, I said some 
time ago, underlies common-sense, animating 
and informing it. According to this system, 
which is the inverse of that which we have 
just intimated, reality in its very depths is 
fixity and permanence. This is the completely 
static conception which sees in being exactly 
the opposite of becoming : we cannot become, 
it seems to say, except in so far as we are not. 
It does not, however, mean to deny move- 
ment. But it represents it as fluctuation 
round invariable types, as a whirling but 
captive eddy. Every phenomenon appears 
to it as a transformation which ends where 
it began, and the result is that the world takes 
the form of an eternal equilibrium in which 
"nothing is created, nothing destroyed." The 
idea does not need much forcing to end in 
the old supposition of a cyclic return which 
restores everything to its original conditions. 
Everything is thus conceived in astronomical 
periods. All that is left of the universe hence- 
forward is a whirl of atoms in which nothing 
counts but certain fixed quantities translated 
by our systems of equations ; the rest has 
vanished "in algebraical smoke." There is 
therefore nothing more or less in the effect 
than in the group of causes ; and the causal 



94 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

relation moves towards identity as towards its 
asymptote. 

Such a view of nature is open to many 
objections, even if it were only a question of 
inorganised matter. Simple physics already 
betoken the insufficiency of a purely mechanic 
conception. The stream of phenomena flows 
in an irreversible direction and obeys a deter- 
mined rhythm. " If I wish to prepare myself 
a glass of sugar and water, I may do what 1 
like, but I must wait for my sugar to melt." 1 
Here are facts which pure mechanism does 
not take into account, regarding as it does 
only statically conceived relations, and making 
time into a measure only, something like a 
common denominator of concrete successions, 
a certain number of coincidences from which 
all true duration remains absent, which would 
remain unchanged even if the world's history, 
instead of opening out in consecutive phases, 
were to be unfolded before our eyes all at 
once like a fan. Do we not indeed speak 
to-day of aging and atomic separation. If 
the quantity of energy is preserved, at least 
its quality is continually deteriorating. By 
the side of something which remains con- 
stant, the world also contains something 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 10. 



TEACHING 95 

which is being used up, dissipated, exhausted, 
decomposed. 

Further still, a specimen of metal, in its 
molecular structure, preserves an indelible 
trace of the treatment it has undergone ; 
natural philosophers tell us that there is a 
"memory of solids." These are all very- 
positive facts which pure mechanism passes 
over. In addition, must we not first of all 
postulate what will afterwards be preserved 
or deteriorated ? Whence we get another 
aspect of things : that of genesis and creation ; 
and in reality we register the ascending effort 
of life as a reality no less startling than 
mechanic inertia. 

Finally, we have a double movement of 
ascent and descent : such is what life and 
matter appear to immediate observation. 
These two currents meet each other, and 
grapple. It is the drama of evolution, of 
which Mr Bergson once gave a masterly ex- 
planation, in stating the high place which man 
fills in nature : 

" I cannot regard the general evolution and 
progress of life in the whole of the organised 
world, the co-ordination and subordination of 
vital functions to one another in the same 
living being, the relations which psychology 



96 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

and physiology combined seem bound to estab- 
lish between brain activity and thought in 
man, without arriving at this conclusion, that 
life is an immense effort attempted by thought 
to obtain of matter something which matter 
does not wish to give it. Matter is inert ; it is 
the seat of necessity ; it proceeds mechanically. 
It seems as if thought seeks to profit by this 
mechanical inclination in matter to utilise it 
for actions, and thus to convert all the creative 
energy it contains, at least all that this energy 
possesses which admits of play and external 
extraction, into contingent movements in space 
and events in time which cannot be foreseen. 
With laborious research it piles up complica- 
tions to make liberty out of necessity, to com- 
pose for itself a matter so subtile, and so 
mobile, that liberty, by a veritable physical 
paradox, and thanks to an effort which cannot 
last long, succeeds in maintaining its equili- 
brium on this very mobility. 

" But it is caught in the snare. The eddy 
on which it was poised seizes and drags it 
down. It becomes prisoner of the mechanism 
it has set up. Automatism lays hold of it, 
and life, inevitably forgetting the end which 
it had determined, which was only to be a 
means in view of a superior end, is entirely 



TEACHING 97 

used up in an effort to preserve itself by itself. 
From the humblest of organised beings to the 
higher vertebrates which come immediately 
before man, we witness an attempt which is 
always foiled and always resumed with more 
and more art. Man has triumphed ; with 
difficulty, it is true, and so incompletely that 
a moment's lapse and inattention on his part 
surrender him to automatism again. But he 
has triumphed. . . ." * 

And Mr Bergson adds in another place : 2 
" With man consciousness breaks the chain. 
In man and in man only it obtains its freedom. 
The whole history of life, till man, had been 
the history of an effort of consciousness to 
lift matter, and of the more or less complete 
crushing of consciousness by matter falling 
upon it again. The enterprise was para- 
doxical ; if indeed we can speak here, except 
paradoxically, of enterprise and effort. The 
task was to take matter, which is necessity 
itself, and create an instrument of liberty, 
construct a mechanical system to triumph 
over mechanism, to employ the determinism 
of nature to pass through the meshes of the 

1 Report of the French Philosophical Society, meeting, 2nd 
May 1901. 

2 Creative Evolution, pp. 286-287. 



98 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

net it had spread. But everywhere, except 
in man, consciousness let itself be caught in 
the net of which it sought to traverse the 
meshes. It remained taken in the mechanisms 
it had set up. The automatism which it 
claimed to be drawing towards liberty enfolds 
it and drags it down. It has not the strength 
to get away, because the energy with which 
it had supplied itself for action is almost 
entirely employed in maintaining the exceed- 
ingly subtile and essentially unstable equi- 
librium into which it has brought matter. 
But man does not merely keep his machine 
going, he succeeds in using it as it pleases him. 
" He owes it without doubt to the superiority 
of his brain, which allows him to construct an 
unlimited number of motor mechanisms, to 
oppose new habits to old time after time, 
and to master automatism by dividing it 
against itself. He owes it to his language, 
which furnishes consciousness with an im- 
material body in which to become incarnate, 
thus dispensing it from depending exclusively 
upon material bodies, the flux of which would 
drag it down and soon engulf it. He owes 
it to social life, which stores and preserves 
efforts as language stores thought, thereby 
fixing a mean level to which individuals will 



TEACHING 99 

rise with ease, and which, by means of this 
initial impulse, prevents average individuals 
from going to sleep and urges better people 
to rise higher. But our brain, our society, and 
our language are only the varied outer signs 
of one and the same internal superiority. Each 
after its fashion, they tell us the unique and 
exceptional success which life has won at a 
given moment of its evolution. They translate 
the difference in nature, and not in degree only, 
which separates man from the rest of the 
animal world. They let us see that if, at the 
end of the broad springboard from which life 
took off, all others came down, finding the 
cord stretched too high, man alone has leapt 
the obstacle." 

But man is not on that account isolated in 
nature : " As the smallest grain of dust forms 
part of our entire solar system, and is involved 
along with it in this undivided downward 
movement which is materiality itself, so all 
organised beings from the humblest to the 
highest, from the first origins of life to the 
times in which we live, and in all places as at 
all times, do but demonstrate to our eyes a 
unique impulse contrary to the movement of 
matter, and, in itself, indivisible. All living 
beings are connected, and all yield to the same 



100 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

formidable thrust. The animal is supported 
by the plant, man rides the animal, and the 
whole of humanity in space and time is an 
immense army galloping by the side of each 
of us, before and behind us, in a spirited charge 
which can upset all resistance, and leap many 
obstacles, perhaps even death." 1 

We see with what broad and far-reaching 
conclusions the new philosophy closes. In the 
forcible poetry of the pages just quoted its 
original accent rings deep and pure. Some of 
its leading theses, moreover, are noted here. 
But now we must discover the solid foundation 
of underlying fact. 

Let us take first the fact of biological evolu- 
tion. Why has it been selected as the basis of 
the system ? Is it really a fact, or is it only a 
more or less conjectural and plausible theory ? 

Notice in the first instance that the argument 
from evolution appears at least as a weapon of 
co-ordination and research admitted in our 
day by all philosophers, rejected only on the 
inspiration of preconceived ideas which are 
completely unscientific ; and that it succeeds 
in the task allotted to it is doubtless already 
the proof that it responds to some part of 
reality. And besides, we can go further. 

1 Creative Evolution, pp, 293-294. 



TEACHING 101 

" The idea of transformism is already con- 
tained in germ in the natural classification 
of organised beings. The naturalist brings re- 
sembling organisms together, divides the group 
into sub-groups, within which the resemblance 
is still greater, and so on; throughout the 
operation, the characteristics of the group 
appear as general themes upon which each 
of the sub-groups executes its particular 
variations. 

" Now this is precisely the relation we find 
in the animal world and in the vegetable world 
between that which produces and what is 
produced ; on the canvas bequeathed by the 
ancestor to his posterity, and possessed in 
common by them, each broiders his original 
pattern." 1 

We may, it is true, ask ourselves whether 
the genealogical method permits results so far 
divergent as those presented to us by variety 
of species. But embryology answers by show- 
ing us the highest and most complex forms of 
life attained every day from very elementary 
forms ; and palaeontology, as it develops, allows 
us to witness the same spectacle in the uni- 
versal history of life, as if the succession of 
phases through which the embryo passes were 

1 Creative Evolution, pp. 24-25. 



102 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

only a recollection and an epitome of the 
complete past whence it has come. In addi- 
tion, the phenomena of sudden changes, 
recently observed, help us to understand 
more easily the conception which obtrudes 
itself under so many heads, by diminishing 
the importance of the apparent lacunae in 
genealogical continuity. Thus the trend of 
all our experience is the same. 

Now there are some certainties which are 
only centres of concurrent probabilities ; there 
are some truths determined only by succession 
of facts, but yet, by their intersection and 
convergence, sufficiently determined. 

" That is how we measure the distance from 
an inaccessible point, by regarding it time 
after time from the points to which we have 
access." * 

Is not that the case here ? The affirmative 
seems all the more inevitable inasmuch as the 
language of transformism is the only language 
known to the biology of to-day. Evolution 
can, it is true, be transposed, but not suppressed, 
since in any actual state there would always 
remain this striking fact that the living forms 
met with as remains in geological layers are 

1 Report of the French Philosophical Society, meetings 
2nd May 1901. 



TEACHING 103 

ranged by the natural affinity of their charac- 
teristics in an order of succession parallel to 
the succession of the ages. We are not really 
then inventing a hypothesis in beginning with 
the affirmation of evolution. But what we 
have to do is to appreciate its object. 

Evolution ! We meet the word everywhere 
to-day. But how rare is the true idea ! Let 
us ask the astronomers who originate cosmo- 
gonical hypotheses, and invent a primitive 
nebula, the natural philosophers who dream 
that by the deterioration of energy and the 
dissipation of movement the material world 
will obtain final rest in the inertia of a homo- 
geneous equilibrium ; let us ask the biologists 
and psychologists who are enemies of fixed 
species and inquisitive about ancestral history. 
What they are anxious to discern in evolution 
is the persistent influence of an initial cause 
once given, the attraction of a fixed end, a 
collection of laws before the eternity of which 
change becomes negligible like an appearance. 
Now he who thinks of the universe as a con- 
struction of unchangeable relations denies by 
his method the evolution of which he speaks, 
since he transforms it into a calculable effect 
necessarily produced by a regulated play of 
generating conditions, since he implicitly 



y^ 



104 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

admits the illusive character of a becoming 
which adds nothing to what is given. 

Finality itself, if he keeps the name, does 
not save him from his error, for finality in his 
eyes is nothing but an efficient cause projected 
into the future. So we see him fixing stages, 
marking periods, inserting means, putting in 
milestones, continually destroying movement 
by halting it before his gaze. And we all 
do the same by instinctive inclination. Our 
concept of law, in its classical form, is not 
general : it represents only the law of co- 
existence and of mechanism, the static relation 
between two numerically disconnected terms ; 
and in order to grasp evolution we shall 
doubtless have to invent a new type of law : 
law in duration, dynamic relation. For we 
can, and we must, conceive that there is an 
evolution of natural laws ; that these laws 
never define anything but a momentary state 
of things ; that they are in reality like streaks 
determined in the flux of becoming by the 
meeting of contrary currents. "Laws," says 
Monsieur Boutroux, " are the bed down which 
passes the torrent of facts ; they have dug it, 
though they follow it." Yet we see the 
common theories of evolution appealing to the 
concepts of the present to describe the past, 



TEACHING 105 

forcing them back to prehistoric times, and 
beyond the reasoning of to-day, placing at the 
beginning what is only conceivable in the 
mind of the contemporary thinker ; in a word, 
imagining the same laws as always existing 
and always observed. This is the method 
which Mr Bergson so justly criticises in 
Spencer : that of reconstructing evolution with 
fragments of its product, 

If we wish thoroughly to grasp the reality 
of things, we must think otherwise. Neither 
of these ready-made concepts, mechanism and 
finality, is in place, because both of them imply 
the same postulate, viz. that "everything is 
given," either at the beginning or at the end, 
whilst evolution is nothing if it is not, on the 
contrary, "that which gives." Let us take 
care not to confound evolution and develop- 
ment. There is the stumbling-block of the 
usual transformist theories, and Mr Bergson 
devotes to it a closely argued and singularly 
penetrating criticism, by an example which he 
analyses in detail. 1 These theories either do 
not explain the birth of variation, and limit 
themselves to an attempt to make us under- 
stand how, once born, it becomes fixed, or else 
through need of adaptation they look for a 

1 Creative Evolution, chap. i. 



J 



106 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

conception of its birth. But in both cases 
they fail. 

" The truth is that adaptation explains the 
windings of the movement of evolution, but 
not the general directions of the movement, 
still less the movement itself. The road which 
leads to the town is certainly obliged to climb 
the hills and go down the slopes ; it adapts 
itself to the accidents of the ground ; but the 
accidents of the ground are not the cause of 
the road, any more than they have imparted 
its direction." 1 

At the bottom of all these errors there are 
only prejudices of practical action. That is 
of course why every work appears to be an 
outside construction beginning with previous 
elements ; a phase of anticipation followed by 
a phase of execution, calculation, and art, an 
effective projecting cause, and a concerted 
goal, a mechanism which hurls to a finality 
which aims. But the genuine explanation 
must be sought elsewhere. And Mr Bergson 
makes this plain by two admirable analyses in 
which he takes to pieces the common ideas of 
disorder and nothingness in order to explain 
their meaning relative to our proceedings in 
industry or language. 

1 Creative Evolution, pp. 111-112. 



TEACHING 107 

Let us come back to facts, to immediate 
experience, and try to translate its pure data 
simply. What are the characteristics of vital 
evolution? First of all it is a dynamic con- 
tinuity, a continuity of qualitative progress ; 
next, it is essentially a duration, an irreversible 
rhythm, a work of inner maturation. By the 
memory inherent in it, the whole of its past 
lives on and accumulates, the whole of its past 
remains for ever present to it ; which is tanta- 
mount to saying that it is experience. 

It is also an effort of perpetual invention, a 
generation of continual novelty, indeducible 
and capable of defying all anticipation, as it 
defies all repetition. We see it at its task of 
research in the groping attempts exhibited by 
the long-sought genesis of species ; we see it 
triumphant in the originality of the least state 
of consciousness, of the least body, of the 
tiniest cell, of which the infinity of times and 
spaces does not offer two identical specimens. 

But the reef which lies in its way, and on 
which too often it founders, is habit; habit 
would be a better and more powerful means 
of action if it remained free, but in so far 
as it congeals and becomes materialised, is a 
hindrance and an obstacle. First of all we 
have the average types round which fluctuates 



108 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

an action which is decreasing and becoming re- 
duced in breadth. Then we have the residual 
organs, the proofs of dead life, the encrusta- 
tions from which the stream of consciousness 
gradually ebbs ; and finally we have the inert 
gear from which all real life has disappeared, 
the masses of shipwrecked " things " rearing 
their spectral outlines where once rolled the 
open sea of mind. The concept of mechanism 
suits the phenomena which occur within the 
zone of wreckage, on this shore of fixities and 
corpses. But life itself is rather finality, if 
not in the anthropomorphic sense of premedi- 
tated design, plan, or programme, at least in 
this sense, that it is a continually renewed 
effort of growth and liberation. And it is 
from here we get Mr Bergson's formulae : vital 
impetus and creative evolution. 

In this conception of being consciousness 
is everywhere, as original and fundamental 
reality, always present in a myriad degrees 
of tension or sleep, and under infinitely various 
rhythms. 

The vital impulse consists in a " demand 
for creation " ; life in its humblest stage al- 
ready constitutes a spiritual activity ; and its 
effort sends out a current of ascending realisa- 
tion which again determines the counter-current 



TEACHING 109 

of matter. Thus all reality is contained in a 
double movement of ascent and descent. The 
first only, which translates an inner work of 
creative maturation, is essentially durable ; 
the second might, in strictness, be almost 
instantaneous, like that of an escaping spring ; 
but the one imposes its rhythm on the other. 
From this point of view mind and matter 
appear not as two things opposed to each 
other, as static terms in fixed antithesis, but 
rather as two inverse directions of movement ; 
and, in certain respects, we must therefore 
speak not so much of matter or mind as of 
spiritualisation and materialisation, the latter 
resulting automatically from a simple inter- 
ruption of the former. " Consciousness or 
superconsciousness is the rocket, the extin- 
guished remains of which fall into matter." 1 
What image of universal evolution is then 
suggested ? Not a cascade of deduction, nor a 
system of stationary pulsations, but a fountain 
which spreads like a sheaf of corn and is 
partially arrested, or at least hindered and 
delayed, by the falling spray. The fountain 
itself, the reality which is created, is vital 
activity, of which spiritual activity represents 
the highest form; and the spray which falls 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 283. 



110 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

is the creative act which falls, it is reality 
which is undone, it is matter and inertia. In 
a word, the supreme law of genesis and fall, 
the double play of which constitutes the 
universe, comprises a psychological formula. 

Everything begins in the manner of an 
invention, as the fruit of duration and creative 
genius, by liberty, by pure mind ; then comes 
habit, a kind of body, as the body is already a 
group of habits ; and habit, taking root, being 
a work of consciousness which escapes it and 
turns against it, is little by little degraded into 
mechanism in which the soul is buried. 



Ill 

The main lines and general perspective of 
Mr Bergson's philosophy now perhaps begin 
to appear. Certainly I am the first to feel 
how powerless a slender resume really is to 
translate all its wealth and all its strength. 

At least I wish I could have contributed to 
making its movement, and what I may call 
its rhythm, clearer to perception. It is from 
the books of the master himself that a more 
complete revelation must be sought. And 
the few words which I am still going to add 
as conclusion are only intended to sketch the 



TEACHING 111 

principal consequences of the doctrine, and 
allow its distant reach to be seen. 

The evolution of life would be a very simple 
and easy thing to understand if it were fulfilled 
along one single trajectory and followed a 
straight path. " But we are here dealing with 
a shell which has immediately burst into frag- 
ments, which, being themselves species of 
shells, have again burst into fragments destined 
to burst again, and so on for a very long 
time." 1 It is, in fact, the property of a 
tendency to develop itself in the expansion 
which analyses it. As for the causes of this 
dispersion into kingdoms, then into species, 
and finally into individuals, we can distin- 
guish two series : the resistance which matter 
opposes to the current of life sent through it, 
and the explosive force — due to an unstable 
equilibrium of tendencies — carried by the vital 
impulse within itself. Both unite in making 
the thrust of life divide in more and more 
diverging but complementary directions, each 
emphasising some distinct aspect of its original 
wealth. Mr Bergson confines himself to the 
branches of the first order — plant, animal, and 
man. And in the course of a minute and 
searching discussion he shows us the character- 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 107. 



112 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

istics of these lines in the moods or qualities 
signified by the three words — torpor, instinct, 
and intelligence: the vegetable kingdom con- 
structing and storing explosives which the 
animal expends, and man creating a nervous 
system for himself which permits him to convert 
the expense into analysis. Let us leave aside, 
as we must, the many suggestive views scattered 
lavishly about, the many flashes of light which 
fall on all faces of the problem, and let us 
confine ourselves to seeing how we get a 
theory of knowledge from this doctrine. 
There we have yet another proof of the 
striking and fertile originality of the new 
philosophy. 

More than one objection has been brought 
against Mr Bergson on this head. That is 
quite natural: how could such a novelty be 
exactly understood at once? It is also very 
desirable ; it is the demands for enlightenment 
which lead a doctrine to full consciousness of 
itself, to precision and perfection. But we 
must be afraid of false objections, those which 
arise from an obstinate translation of the new 
philosophy into an old language steeped in 
a different metaphysic. With what has Mr 
Bergson been reproached ? With misunder- 
standing reason, with ruining positive science, 



TEACHING 118 

with being caught in the illusion of getting 
knowledge otherwise than by intelligence, or 
of thinking otherwise than by thought ; in 
short, of falling into a vicious circle by making 
intellectualism turn round upon itself. Not 
one of these reproaches has any foundation. 

Let us begin by a few preliminary remarks 
to clear the ground. First of all, there is one 
ridiculous objection which I quote only to 
record. I mean that which suspects at the 
bottom of the theories which we are going to 
discuss some dark background, some pre- 
possession of irrational mysticism. On the 
contrary, the truth is, we have here perhaps 
better than anywhere, the spectacle of pure 
thought face to face with things. But it is 
a complete thought, not thought reduced to 
some partial functions, but sufficiently sure of 
its critical power to sacrifice none of its re- 
sources. Here, we may say, really is the 
genuine positivism, which reinstates all spiritual 
reality. It does not in any way lead to a 
misunderstanding or depreciation of science. 
Even where contingency and relativity are 
most visible in it, in the domain of inert matter, 
Mr Bergson goes so far as to say that physical 
science touches an absolute. It is true that it 

touches this absolute rather than sees it. More 

8 



114 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

particularly it perceives all its reactions on a 
system of representative forms which it presents 
to it, and observes the effect on the veil of 
theory with which it envelops it. At certain 
moments, all the same, the veil becomes 
almost transparent. And in any case the 
scholars thought guesses and grazes reality 
in the curve drawn by the succession of its 
increasing syntheses. But there are two 
orders of science. Formerly it was from the 
mathematician that we borrowed the ideal of 
evidence. Hence came the inclination always 
to seek the most certain knowledge from the 
most abstract side. The temptation was to 
make a kind of less severe and rigorous mathe- 
matics of biology itself. Now if such a method 
suits the study of inert matter because in a 
manner geometrical, so much so that our 
knowledge of it thus acquired is more incom- 
plete than inexact, this is not at all the case 
for the things of life. Here, if we were to 
conduct scientific research always in the same 
grooves and according to the same formulas, 
we should immediately encounter symbolism 
and relativity. For life is progress, whilst the 
geometrical method is commensurable only 
with things. Mr Bergson is aware of this ; 
and his rare merit has been to disengage 



TEACHING 115 

specific originality from biology, while elevat- 
ing it to a typical and standard science. 

But let us come to the heart of the problem. 
What was Kant's point of departure in the 
theory of knowledge ? In seeking to define 
the structure of the mind according to the 
traces of itself which it must have left in 
its works, and in proceeding by a reflective 
analysis ascending from a fact to its condi- 
tions, he could only regard intelligence as a 
thing made, a fixed system of categories 
and principles. 

Mr Bergson adopts an inverse attitude. 
Intelligence is a product of evolution : we see 
it slowly and uninterruptedly constructed along 
a line which rises through the vertebrates to 
man. Such a point of view is the only one 
which conforms to the real nature of things, 
and the actual conditions of reality ; the more 
we think of it, the more we perceive that the 
theory of knowledge and the theory of life are 
bound up with one another. Now what do 
we conclude from this point of view ? Life, 
considered in the direction of "knowledge," 
evolves on two diverging lines which at first 
are confused, then gradually separate, and 
finally end in two opposed forms of organisa- 
tion, intelligence and instinct. Several con- 



Jl 



116 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

trary potentialities interpenetrated at their 
common source, but of this source each of 
these kinds of activity preserves or rather 
accentuates only one tendency ; and it will be 
easy to mark its dual character. 

Instinct is sympathy ; it has no clear con- 
sciousness of itself; it does not know how to 
reflect ; it is hardly capable of varying its steps ; 
but it operates with incomparable certainty 
because it remains lodged in things, in com- 
munion with their rhythm and with inner 
feeling of them. The history of animals in 
this respect supplies many remarkable examples 
which Mr Bergson analyses and discusses in 
detail. As much might be said of the work 
which produces a living body, and of the effort 
which presides over its growth, maintenance, 
and functions. Take a natural philosopher 
who has long breathed the atmosphere of the 
laboratory, who has by long practice acquired 
what we call " experience " ; he has a kind of 
intimate feeling for his instruments, their 
resources, their movements, their working 
tendencies ; he perceives them as extensions of 
himself ; he possesses them as groups of habitual 
actions, thus discoursing by manipulations as 
easily and spontaneously as others discourse in 
calculation. Doubtless that is only an image ; 



TEACHING 117 

but transpose it and generalise it, and it will 
help you to understand the kind of action 
which divines instinct. But intelligence is 
something quite different. We are talking, 
of course, of the analytic and synthetic intelli- 
gence which we use in our acts of current 
thought, which works throughout our daily 
action and forms the fundamental thread of 
our scientific operations. I need not here go 
back to the criticism of its ordinary proceed- 
ings. But I must now note the service which 
suits them, the domain in which they apply 
and are valid, and what they teach us thereby 
about the meaning, reach, and natural task of 
intelligence. 

Whilst instinct vibrates in sympathetic har- 
mony with life, it is about inert matter that 
intelligence is granted ; it is a rider to our 
faculty of action ; it triumphs in geometry ; 
it feels at home among the objects in which 
our industry finds its supports and its tools. 
In a word, " our logic is primarily the logic of 
solids." 1 But if we enter the vital order its 
incompetence is manifestly apparent. 

It is very significant that deduction should 
be so impotent in biology. Still more im- 
potent is it perhaps in matters of art or 

1 Preface to Creative Evolution, 



118 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

religion; whilst, on the contrary, it works 
marvels so long as it has only to foresee move- 
ments or transformations in bodies. What 
does this mean, if not that intelligence and 
materiality go together, that language with its 
analytic steps is regulated by the movements 
of matter ? Philosophy once again then must 
leave it behind, for the duty of philosophy is 
to consider everything in its relation to life. 

Do not conclude, however, that the philo- 
sopher's duty is to renounce intelligence, place 
it under tutelage, or abandon it to the blind 
suggestions of feeling and will. It has not 
even the right to do so. Instinct, with us 
who have evolved along the grooves of in- 
telligence, has remained too weak to be suffi- 
cient for us. Besides, intelligence is the only 
path by which light could dawn in the bosom 
of primitive darkness. But let us look at 
present reality in all its complexity, all its 
wealth. Round intelligence itself exists a 
halo of instinct. This halo represents the 
remains of the first nebulous vapour at the 
expense of which intelligence was constituted 
like a brilliantly condensed nucleus ; and it is 
still to-day the atmosphere which gives it life, 
the fringe of touch, and delicate probing, 
inspiring contact and divining sympathy, 



TEACHING 119 

which we see in play in the phenomena of 
discovery, as also in the acts of that " attention 
to life," and that " sense of reality " which is 
the soul of good sense, so widely distinct from 
common-sense. And the peculiar task of the 
philosopher is to reabsorb intelligence in 
instinct, or rather to reinstate instinct in in- 
telligence ; or better still, to win back to the 
heart of intelligence all the initial resources 
which it must have sacrificed. This is what 
is meant by return to the primitive, and the 
immediate, to reality and life. This is the 
meaning of intuition. 

Certainly the task is difficult. We at once 
suspect a vicious circle. How can we go 
beyond intelligence except by intelligence 
itself ? We are apparently inside our thought, 
as incapable of coming out of it as is a balloon 
of rising above the atmosphere. True, but on 
this reasoning we could just as well prove that 
it is impossible for us to acquire any new habit 
whatsoever, impossible for life to grow and 
go beyond itself continually. 

We must avoid drawing false conclusions 
from the simile of the balloon. The question 
here is to know what are the real limits of the 
atmosphere. It is certain that the synthetic 
and critical intelligence, left to its own strength, 



120 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

remains imprisoned in a circle from which 
there is no escape. 

But action removes the barrier. If intelli- 
gence accepts the risk of taking the leap into 
the phosphorescent fluid which bathes it, and 
to which it is not altogether foreign, since it 
has broken off from it and in it dwell the 
complementary powers of the understanding, 
intelligence will soon become adapted and so 
will only be lost for a moment to reappear 
greater, stronger, and of fuller content. It is 
action again under the name of experience 
which removes the danger of illusion or 
giddiness, it is action which verifies-, by a 
practical demonstration, by an effort of en- 
during maturation which tests the idea in 
intimate contact with reality and judges it 
by its fruits. 

It always falls therefore to intelligence to 
pronounce the grand verdict in the sense that 
only that can be called true which will finally 
satisfy it ; but we mean an intelligence duly 
enlarged and transformed by the very effect 
of the action it has lived. Thus the objection 
of " irrationalism " directed against the new 
philosophy falls to the ground. 

The objection of "non-morality" fares no 
better. But it has been made, and people 



TEACHING 121 

have thought fit to accuse Mr Bergson's work 
of being the too calm production of an intel- 
ligence too indifferent, too coldly lucid, too 
exclusively curious to see and understand, un- 
troubled and un thrilled by the universal drama 
of life, by the tragic reality of evil. On the 
other hand, not without contradiction, the 
new philosophy has been called " romantic," 
and people have tried to find in it the essen- 
tial traits of romanticism : its predilection for 
feeling and imagination, its unique anxiety 
for vital intensity, its recognised right to all 
which is to be, whence its radical inability to 
establish a hierarchy of moral qualifications. 
Strange reproach ! The system in question is 
not yet presented to us as a finished system. 
Its author manifests a plain desire to classify 
his problems. And he is certainly right in 
proceeding so : there is a time for everything, 
and on occasion we must learn to be just an 
eye focussed upon being. But that does not 
at all exclude the possibility of future works, 
treating in due order of the problem of human 
destiny, and perhaps even in the work so far 
completed we may descry some attempts to 
bring this future within ken. 

But universal evolution, though creative, is 
not for all that quixotic or anarchist. It forms 



122 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

a sequence. Tt is a becoming with direction, 
undoubtedly due, not to the attraction of a 
clearly preconceived goal, or the guidance of 
an outer law, but to the actual tendency of 
the original thrust. In spite of the stationary 
eddies or momentary backwashes we observe 
here and there, its stream moves in a definite 
direction, ever swelling and broadening. For 
the spectator who regards the general sweep 
of the current, evolution is growth. On the 
other hand, he who thinks this growth now 
ended is under a simple delusion : " The gates 
of the future stand wide open." * In the stage 
at present attained man is leading ; he marks 
the culminating point at which creation con- 
tinues ; in him, life has already succeeded, at 
least up to a certain point ; from him onwards 
it advances with consciousness capable of re- 
flection ; is it not for that very reason re- 
sponsible for the result ? Life, according to 
the new philosophy, is a continual creation of 
what is new : new — be it well understood — in 
the sense of growth and progress in relation to 
what has gone before. Life, in a word, is 
mental travel, ascent in a path of growing 
spiritualisation. Such at least is the intense 
desire, and such the first tendency which 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 114. 



TEACHING 123 

launched and still inspires it. But it may 
faint, halt, or travel down the hill. This is an 
undeniable fact ; and once recognised does it 
not awake in us the presentiment of a directing 
law immanent in vital effort, a law doubtless 
not to be found in any code, nor yet bind- 
ing through the stern behest of mechanical 
necessity, but a law which finds definition at 
every moment, and at every moment also 
marks a direction of progress, being as it were 
the shifting tangent to the curve of becoming ? 

Let us add that according to the new philo- 
sophy the whole of our past survives for ever 
in us, and by means of us results in action. 
It is then literally true that our acts do to a 
certain extent involve the whole universe, and 
its whole history : the act which we make it 
accomplish will exist henceforward for ever, 
and will for ever tinge universal duration with 
its indelible shade. Does not that imply an 
imperious, urgent, solemn, and tragic problem 
of action ? Nay, more ; memory makes a 
persistent reality of evil, as of good. Where 
are we to find the means to abolish and re- 
absorb the evil? What in the individual is 
called memory becomes tradition and joint 
responsibility in the race. 

On the other hand, a directing law is im- 



124 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

manent in life, but in the shape of an appeal 
to endless transcendence. In dealing with 
this future transcendent to our daily life, with 
this further shore of present experience, where 
are we to seek the inspiring strength ? And 
is there not ground for asking ourselves 
whether intuitions have not arisen here and 
there in the course of history, lighting up the 
dark road of the future for us with a prophetic 
ray of dawn ? It is at this point that the new 
philosophy would find place for the problem 
of religion. 

But this word "religion," which has not 
come once so far from Mr Bergson's pen, 
coming now from mine, warns me that it 
is time to end. No man to-day would be 
justified in foreseeing the conclusions to which 
the doctrine of creative evolution will one day 
undoubtedly lead on this point. More than 
any other, I must forget here what I myself 
may have elsewhere tried to do in this order 
of ideas. But it was impossible not to feel 
the approach of the temptation. Mr Bergson's 
work is extraordinarily suggestive. His books, 
so measured in tone, so tranquil in harmony, 
awaken in us a mystery of presentiment 
and imagination ; they reach the hidden re- 
treats where the springs of consciousness well 



TEACHING 125 

up. Long after we have closed them we are 
shaken within ; strangely moved, we listen to 
the deepening echo, passing on and on. How- 
ever valuable already their explicit contents 
may be, they reach still further than they 
aimed. It is impossible to tell what latent 
germs they foster. It is impossible to guess 
what lies behind the boundless distance of the 
horizons they expose. But this at least is 
sure : these books have verily begun a new 
work in the history of human thought. 



ADDITIONAL EXPLANATIONS 

I 

MR BERGSON'S WORK AND THE 
GENERAL DIRECTIONS OF CON- 
TEMPORARY THOUGHT 

A broad survey of the new philosophy was 
bound to be somewhat rapid and summary; 
and now that this is completed it will doubt- 
less not be superfluous to come back, on the 
same plan as before, to some more important 
or more difficult individual points, and to 
examine by themselves the most prominent 
centres on which we should focus the light 
of our attention. Not that I intend to probe 
in minute detail the folds and turns of a 
doctrine which admits of infinite develop- 
ment : how can I claim to exhaust a work 
of such profound thought that the least 
passing example employed takes its place as a 
particular study ? Still less do I wish to under- 

126 



BERGSON & CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT 127 

take a kind of analytic resumd; no undertaking 
could be less profitable than that of arranging 
paragraph headings to repeat too briefly, and 
therefore obscurely, what a thinker has said 
without any extravagance of language, yet 
with every requisite explanation. 

The critic's true task, as I understand it, 
in no way consists in drawing up a table of 
contents strewn with qualifying notes. His 
task is to read and enable others to read 
between the lines, between the chapters, and 
between the successive works, what constitutes 
the dynamic tie between them, all that the 
linear form of writing and language has not 
allowed the author himself to elucidate. 

His task is, as far as possible, to master the 
accompaniment of underlying thought which 
produced the resonant atmosphere of the 
inquirer's intuition, the rhythm and toning 
of the image, resulting in the shade of light 
which falls upon his vision. His task, in a 
word, is to help understanding, and therefore 
to point out and anticipate the misunder- 
standings to be feared. Now it seems to me 
that there are a few points round which the 
errors of interpretation more naturally gather, 
producing some astounding misconceptions of 
Mr Bergson's philosophy. It is these points 



128 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

only that I propose to clear up. But at the 
same time I shall use the opportunity to 
supply information about authorities, which 
I have hitherto deliberately omitted, to avoid 
riddling with references pages which were 
primarily intended to impart a general 
impression. 

Let us begin by glancing at the milieu of 
thought in which Mr Bergson's philosophy 
must have had birth. For the last thirty years 
new currents are traceable. In what direction 
do they go? And what distance have they 
already gone? What, in short, are the 
intellectual characteristics of our time ? We 
must endeavour to distinguish the deeper 
tendencies, those which herald and prepare 
the near future. 

One of the essential and frequently cited 
features of the generation in which Taine and 
Renan were the most prominent leaders was 
the passionate, enthusiastic, somewhat ex- 
clusive and intolerant cult of positive science. 
This science, in its days of pride, was con- 
sidered unique, displayed on a plane by it- 
self, always uniformly competent, capable of 
gripping any object whatever with the same 
strength, and of inserting it in the thread 
of one and the same unbroken connection. 



BERGSON & CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT 129 

The dream of that time, despite all verbal 
palliations, was a universal science of mathe- 
matics : mathematics, of course, with their 
bare and brutal rigour softened and shaded 
off, where feasible ; if possible, supple and 
sensitive ; in ideal, delicate, buoyant, and 
judicious ; but mathematics governed from 
end to end by an equal necessity. Conceived 
as the sole mistress of truth, this science was 
expected in days to come to fulfil all the needs 
of man, and unreservedly to take the place 
of ancient spiritual discipline. Genuine philo- 
sophy had had its day : all metaphysics seemed 
deception and fantasy, a simple play of empty 
formulae or puerile dreams, a mythical pro- 
cession of abstraction and phantom ; religion 
itself paled before science, as poetry of the 
grey morning before the splendour of the 
rising sun. 

However, after all this pride came the turn 
of humility, and humility of the very lowest. 
This deified science, borne down in its hour 
of triumph by too heavy a weight, had 
necessarily been recognised as powerless to 
go beyond the order of relations, and radically 
incapable of telling us the origin, end, and 
basis of things. It analysed the conditions of 
phenomena, but was ill-suited ever to grasp 



130 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

any real cause, or any deep essence. Further, 
it became the Unknowable, before which the 
human mind could only halt in despair. And 
in this way destitution arose out of ambition 
itself, since thought, after trusting too ex- 
clusively to its geometrical strength, was 
compelled at the end of its effort to confess 
itself beaten when confronted with the only 
questions to which no man may ever be 
indifferent. 

This double attitude is no longer that of 
the contemporary generation. The prestige 
of illusion has vanished. In the religion of 
science we see now nothing but idolatry. The 
haughty affirmation of yesterday appears to- 
day, not as expressing a positive fact or a 
result duly established, but as bringing forward 
a thesis of perilous and unconscious meta- 
physics. Let us go even further. If true 
intelligence is mental expansion and aptitude 
for understanding widely different things, each 
in its originality, to the same degree, we must 
say that the claim to reduce reality to one 
only of its modes, to know it in one only of 
its forms, is an unintelligent claim. That is, 
in brief formula, the verdict of the present 
generation. Not, of course, that it in any 
way misconceives or disdains the true value 



BERGSON & CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT 131 

of science, whether as an instrument of action 
for the conquest of nature, or as intelligible 
language, allowing us to know our whereabouts 
in things and " talk " them. 

It is aware that in all circumstances positive 
methods have their evidence to produce, and 
that, where they pronounce within the limits 
of their power, nothing can stand against their 
verdict. But it considers first of all that 
science was conceived of late under much too 
stiff and narrow a form, under the obsession 
of too abstract a mathematical ideal which 
corresponds to one aspect of reality only, and 
that the shallowest. And it considers after- 
wards that science, even when broadened and 
made flexible, being concerned only with what 
is, with fact and datum, remains radically 
powerless to solve the problem of human life. 
Nowhere does science penetrate to the very 
depth of things, and there is nothing in the 
world but "things." 

Experience has shown where the dream of 
universal mathematics leads us. Number is 
driven to the heart of phenomena and nature 
dissected with this delicate scalpel. Speaking 
in more general terms, we adopt spatial relation 
as the perfect example of intelligible relation. 
I do not wish to deny the use of such a method 



132 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

now and again, the services it may render, or 
the beauty of construction peculiar to the 
systems it inspires. But we must see what 
price we pay for these advantages. Do we 
choose geometry for an informing and regulat- 
ing science? The more we advance towards 
the concrete and the living, the more we feel 
the necessity of altering the pure mathematical 
type. The sciences, as they get further from 
inert matter, unless they agree to reform, pale 
and weaken ; they become vague, impotent, 
anaemic ; they touch little but the trite surface 
of their object, the body, not the soul ; in 
them symbolism, artifice, and relativity become 
increasingly evident ; at length, arbitrary and 
conventional elements crop up and devour 
them. In a word, the claim to treat the 
living as inert matter conduces to the miscon- 
ception in life of life itself, and the retention 
of nothing but the material waste. 

This experience furnishes us with a lesson. 
There is not so much one science as several 
sciences, each distinguished by an autonomous 
method, and divided into two great kingdoms. 

Let us therefore from the outset follow Mr 
Bergson in tracing a very sharp line of de- 
marcation between the inert and the living. 
Two orders of knowledge will thereby become 



BERGSON & CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT 133 

separate, one in which the frames of geometri- 
cal understanding are in place, the other where 
new means and a new attitude are required. 
The essential task of the present hour will 
now appear to us in a precise light ; it will 
henceforward consist, without any disregard 
of a glorious past, in an effort to found as 
specifically distinct methods of instruction 
those sciences which take for objects the 
successive moments of life in its different 
degrees, biology, psychology, sociology ; — then 
in an effort to reconstruct, setting out from 
these new sciences and according to their 
spirit, the like of what ancient philosophy had 
attempted, setting out from geometry and 
mechanics. By so doing we shall succeed in 
throwing knowledge open to receive all the 
wealth of reality, while at the same time we 
shall reinstate the sense of mystery and the 
thrill of higher anxieties. A further result 
will be that the phantom of the Unknowable 
will be exorcised, since it no longer represents 
anything but the relative and momentary 
limit of each method, the portion of being 
which escapes its partial grip. 

This is one of the first controlling ideas of 
the contemporary generation. Others result 
from it. More particularly, it is for the same 



134 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

body of motives, in the same sense, and with 
the same restrictions, that we distrust intellec- 
tualism ; I mean the tendency to live uniquely 
by intelligence, to think as if the whole of 
thought consisted in analytic, clear and reason- 
ing understanding. 

Once again, it is not a question of some 
blind abandonment to sentiment, imagination, 
or will, nor do we claim to restrict the 
legitimate rights of intellectuality in judg- 
ment. But around critical reason there is a 
quickening atmosphere in which dwell the 
powers of intuition, there is a half-light of 
gradual tones in which insertion into reality 
is effected. If by rationalism we mean the 
attitude which consists in cabining ourselves 
within the zone of geometrical light in which 
language evolves, we must admit that ration- 
alism supposes something other than itself, 
that it hangs suspended by a generating act 
which escapes it. 

The method therefore which we seek to 
employ everywhere to-day is experience ; but 
complete experience, anxious to neglect no 
aspect of being nor any resource of mind ; 
shaded experience, not extending on the 
surface only, in a homogeneous and uniform 
manner ; on the contrary, an experience 



BERGSON & CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT 135 

distributed in depth over multiple planes, 
adopting a thousand different forms to adapt 
itself to the different kinds of problems ; in 
short, a creative and informing experience, a 
veritable genesis, a genuine action of thought, 
a work and movement of life by which 
the guiding principles, forms of intelligibility, 
and criteria of verification obtain birth and 
stability in habits. And here again it is by 
borrowing Mr Bergson's own formula from 
him that we shall most accurately describe the 
new spirit. 

That the attitude and fundamental pro- 
cedure of this new spirit are in no way a 
return to scepticism or a reaction against 
thought cannot be better demonstrated than 
by this resurrection of metaphysics, this re- 
naissance of idealism, which is certainly one 
of the most distinctive features of our epoch. 
Undoubtedly philosophy in France has never 
known so prosperous and so pregnant a 
moment. Notwithstanding, it is not a return 
to the old dreams of dialectic construction. 
Everything is regarded from the point of 
view of life, and there is a tendency more and 
more to recognise the primacy of spiritual 
activity. But we wish to understand and 
employ this activity and this life in all its 



136 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

wealth, in all its degrees, and by all its 
functions: we wish to think with the whole 
of thought, and go to the truth with the 
whole of our soul ; and the reason of which 
we recognise the sovereign weight is reason 
laden with its complete past history. 

And what is that, really, but realism ? By 
realism I mean the gift of ourselves to reality, 
the work of concrete realisation, the effort to 
convert every idea into action, to regulate the 
idea by the action as much as the action by 
the idea, to live what we think and think 
what we live. But that is positivism, you 
will say ; certainly it is positivism. But how 
changed ! Far from considering as positive 
only that which can be an object of sensa- 
tion or calculation, we begin by greeting 
the great spiritual realities with this title. 
The deep and living aspiration of our day is 
in everything to seek the soul, the soul which 
specifies and quickens, seek it by an effort 
towards the revealing sympathy which is 
genuine intelligence, seek it in the concrete, 
without dissolving thought in dreams or 
language, without losing contact with the 
body or critical control, seek it, in fine, as 
the most real and genuine part of being. 

Hence its return to questions which were 



BERGSON & CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT 137 

lately declared out of date and closed ; hence 
its taste for problems of aesthetics and morality, 
its close siege of social and religious problems, 
its homesickness for a faith harmonising the 
powers of action and the powers of thought ; 
hence its restless desire to hark back to tra- 
dition and discipline. 

A new philosophy was required to answer 
this new way of looking at things. Already, 
in 1867, Ravaisson in his celebrated Report 
wrote these prophetic lines : " Many signs 
permit us to foresee in the near future a 
philosophical epoch of which the general 
character will be the predominance of what 
may be called spiritualist realism or positivism, 
having as generating principle the conscious- 
ness which the mind has in itself of an 
existence recognised as being the source and 
support of every other existence, being none 
other than its action." 

This prophetic view was further commented 
on in a work where Mr Bergson speaks with 
just praise of this shrewd and penetrating 
sense of what was coming : " What could be 
bolder or more novel than to come and pre- 
dict to the physicists that the inert will be 
explained by the living, to biologists that 
life will only be understood by thought, to 



138 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

philosophers that generalities are not philo- 
sophic?" 1 

But let us give each his due. What Ravais- 
son had only anticipated Mr Bergson himself 
accomplishes, with a precision which gives 
body to the impalpable and floating breath of 
first inspiration, with a depth which renews 
both proof and theses alike, with a creative 
originality which prevents the critic who is 
anxious for justice and precision from insisting 
on any researches establishing connection of 
thought. 

One reason for the popularity to-day enjoyed 
by this new philosophy is doubtless to be found 
in the very tendencies of the milieu in which 
it is produced and in the aspirations which 
work it. But, after once remarking these 
desires, we must further not forget that Mr 
Bergson has contributed more than anyone 
else to awaken them, determine them, and 
make them become conscious of themselves. 
Let us therefore try to understand in itself 
and by itself the work of genius of which just 
now we were seeking the dawning gleams. 
What synthetic formula will be best able to 

1 Notice on the Life and Works of M. Felix Ravaisson- 
Molien, in the Reports of the Academy of Moral and 
Political Sciences, 1904, 



BERGSON & CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT 139 

tell us the essential direction of its movement ? 
I will borrow it from the author himself : " It 
seems to me," he writes, 1 " that metaphysics 
are trying at this moment to simplify them- 
selves, to come nearer to life." Every philo- 
sophy tends to become incarnate in a system 
which constitutes for it a kind of body of 
analysis. 

Regarded literally, it appears to be an in- 
finite complication, a complex construction 
with a thousand alcoves of high architecture, 
" in which measures have been taken to pro- 
vide ample lodging for all problems." 2 Do 
not let us be deceived by this appearance : it 
signifies only that language is incommensurable 
with thought, that speech admits of endless 
multiplication in approximations incapable of 
exhausting their object. But before construct- 
ing such a body for itself, all philosophy is a 
soul, a mind, and begins with the simple unity 
of a generating intuition. Here is the fitting 
point at which to see its essence ; this is what 
determines it much better than its conceptual 
expression, which is always contingent and 
incomplete. "A philosophy worthy of the 

1 Philosophic Intuition in the Revue de Metaphysique et de 
Morale, November 191 1. 

2 Ibid. 



140 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

name has never said but one thing ; and that 
thing it has rather attempted to say than 
actually said. And it has only said one thing, 
because it has only seen one point: and 
that was not so much vision as contact ; this 
contact supplied an impulse, this impulse a 
movement, and if this movement, which is a 
kind of vortex of a certain particular form, is 
only visible to our eyes by what it has picked 
up on its path, it is no less true that other 
dust might equally well have been raised, and 
that it would still have been the same vortex." * 

Hence comes the fact that a philosophy is 
at bottom much more independent of its natal 
environment than one might at first suppose ; 
hence also the fact that ancient philosophies, 
though apparently relative to a science which 
is out of date, remain always living and worthy 
of study. 

What, then, is the original intuition of Mr 
Bergson's philosophy, the creative intuition 
whence it comes forth ? We cannot hesitate 
long : it is the intuition of duration. That is 
the perspective centre to which we must inde- 
fatigably return ; that is the principle which 
we must labour to expose in its full light ; and 

1 Philosophic Intuition in the Revue de Metaphysique et de 
Morale, November 191 1. 



BERGSON & CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT 141 

that is, finally, the source of light which will 
illumine us. Now a philosophy is not only an 
expressed intuition ; it is further and above 
all an acting intuition, gradually determined 
and realised, and tested by its explanatory 
works ; and it is by its fruits that we can 
understand and judge it. Hence the review 
upon which we are entering. 



II 

IMMEDIACY 

The philosopher's first duty is in clear language 
to declare his starting-point, with what a 
mathematician would call the " tangent to the 
origin " of the path along which he is travelling, 
as afterwards the critic's first duty is to describe 
this initial attitude. I have therefore first of 
all to indicate the directing idea of the new 
philosophy. But it is not a question of 
extracting a quintessence, or of fencing the 
soul of doctrine within a few summary 
formulae. A system is not to be resumed in 
a phrase, for every proposition isolated is a 
proposition falsified. I wish merely to eluci- 
date the methodical principle which inspires 
the beginning of Mr Bergson's philosophy. 

To philosophy itself falls the task and 
belongs the right to define itself gradually 
as it becomes constituted. On this point, 
an anticipation of experience seems hardly 

142 



IMMEDIACY 143 

possible ; here, as elsewhere, the finding of a 
synthetic formula is a final rather than pre- 
liminary question. However, we are obliged 
from the outset of the work to determine the 
programme of the inquiry, if only to direct 
our research. It is the same on the threshold 
of every science. There, it is true, the analogy 
ceases. For in any science properly speaking 
the determination of beginning consists in the 
indication of an object, and a matter, and 
beyond that, to each new object a new science 
reciprocally corresponds, the existence of the 
one involving the legitimacy of the other. 
But if the various sciences — I mean the positive 
sciences — divide different objects thus between 
them, philosophy cannot, in its turn, come 
forward as a particular science, having a 
distinct object, the designation of which would 
be sufficient to characterise and circumscribe 
it. Such was always the traditional concep- 
tion : such will ours continue to be. For, as a 
matter of fact, every object has a philosophy 
and all matter can be regarded philosophically. 
In short, philosophy is chiefly a way of per- 
ceiving and thinking, an attitude and a 
proceeding: the peculiar and specific in it is 
more an intuition than a content, a spirit 
rather than a domain. 



144 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

What, then, is the characteristic function of 
philosophy, at least its initial function, that 
which marks its opening? 

To criticise the works of knowledge spon- 
taneously effected ; that is to say, to scrutinise 
their direction, reach, and conditions: that is 
to-day the unanimous answer of philosophers 
when questioned about the goal of their labours. 
In other terms, what they study is not so much 
such and such a particular " thing " as the 
relation of mind to each of the realities to be 
studied. Their object, if we must employ the 
word, is knowledge itself, it is the act of know- 
ing regarded from the point of view of its 
meaning and value. Philosophy thus appears 
as a new " order " of knowledge, co-extensive 
with what is knowable, as a kind of knowledge 
of the second degree, in which it is less a 
question of learning than of understanding, in 
which we aim at progressing in depth rather 
than in extent ; not effort to extend the 
quantity of knowledge, but reflection on the 
quality of this knowledge. Spontaneous 
thought — vulgar or scientific — is a direct, 
simple, and practical thought turned towards 
things and partial to useful results ; seeking 
what is formidable rather than what is true, or 
at least so fond of formulae which can be 



IMMEDIACY 145 

handled, manipulated, or transmitted, that it is 
always tempted to see the truth in them ; a 
thought which, moreover, sets out from more 
or less unguarded postulates, abandons itself 
to the motive impulses of habits contracted, 
and goes straight on indefinitely without self- 
examination. Philosophy, on the contrary, 
desires to be thought about thought, thought 
retracing its life and work, knowledge labour- 
ing to know itself, fact which aspires to fact 
about itself, mental effort to become free, to 
become entirely transparent and luminous in 
its own eyes, and, if need be, to effect self- 
reform by dissipating its natural illusions. 
What we have before our eyes then are the 
initial postulates themselves, the first spon- 
taneous thoughts, the obscure origins of 
reason ; and we are proceeding towards a 
point of departure rather than arrival. 

The new philosophy does not refuse to carry 
out this first critical task ; but it carries it out 
in its own way after determining more pre- 
cisely the real conditions of the problem. At 
the hour when methodical research begins, the 
philosopher's mind is not clean-swept ; and it 
would be chimerical to wish to place oneself 
from the beginning, by some act of trans- 
cendence, outside common thought. This 

10 



146 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

thought cannot be inspected and judged from 
outside. It constitutes, whether we wish it 
or no, the sole concrete and positive point of 
departure. Let us add that common-sense 
constitutes also our sole point of insertion into 
reality. It can only then be a question of 
purifying it, not in any way of replacing it. 
But we must distinguish in it what is pure 
fact, and what is ulterior arrangement, in order 
to see what are the problems which really are 
presented, and what are, on the contrary, the 
false problems, the illusory problems, those 
which relate only to our artifices of language. 

The search for facts is then the first necessary 
moment of all philosophy. 

But common thought comes before us at 
the outset as a piece of very composite alluvial 
ground. It is a beginning of positive science, 
and also a residue of all philosophical opinions 
which have had some vogue. That, however, 
is not its primary basis. Primum vivere, 
delude philosophari, says the proverb. In 
certain respects, " speculation is a luxury, 
whilst action is a necessity." 1 But "life re- 
quires us to apprehend things in the relation 
they have to our needs." 2 Hence comes the 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 47. 

2 Laughter, p. 154. 



IMMEDIACY 147 

fundamental utilitarianism of common-sense. 
Therefore if we wish to define it in itself and 
for itself, and no longer as a first approxima- 
tion of such and such a system of metaphysics, 
it appears to us no longer as rudimentary 
science and philosophy, but as an organisation 
of thought in view of practical life. Thus it 
is that outside all speculative opinion it is 
effectively lived by all. Its proper language, 
we may say, is the language of customary 
perception and mechanical fabrication, there- 
fore a language relative to action, made to 
express action, modelled upon action, trans- 
lating things by the relations they maintain 
to our action ; I mean our corporal and 
synthetic action, which very evidently implies 
thought, since it is a question of the action 
of a reasonable being, but which thus con- 
tains a thought which is itself eminently 
practical. 

However, we are here regarding common- 
sense considered as a source of fact. Its 
utilitarianism then becomes a kind of spon- 
taneous metaphysics from which we must 
detach ourselves. But is it not the very task 
of positive science to execute this work of 
purification ? Nothing of the kind, despite 
appearances and despite intentions. Let us 



148 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

examine more closely. The general categories 
of common thought, according to Mr Bergson, 1 
remain those of science ; the main roads 
traced by our senses through the continuity 
of reality are still those along which science 
will pass ; perception is an infant science and 
science an adult perception ; so much so that 
customary knowledge and scientific knowledge, 
both of them destined to prepare our action 
upon things, are of necessity two visions of 
the same kind, though of unequal precision 
and reach. It does not follow that science 
does not practise a certain disinterestedness as 
far as immediate mechanical utility is con- 
cerned ; it does not follow that it has no value 
as knowledge. But it does not set itself 
genuinely free from the habits contracted in 
common experience, and to inform its research 
it preserves the postulates of common-sense ; 
so that it always grasps things by their 
" actable " side, by their point of contact with 
our faculty for action, under the forms by 
which we handle them conceptually or practi- 
cally, and all it attains of reality is that by 
which nature is a possible object of language 
or industry. 

1 Philosophic Intuition in the Metaphysical and Moral 
Review, November 191 1, p. 825. 



IMMEDIACY 149 

Let us turn now towards another aspect of 
natural thought, to discover in it the germ 
of the necessary criticism. By the side of 
" common-sense," which is the first rough- 
draft of positive science, there is " good sense," 
which differs from it profoundly, and marks 
the beginning of what we shall later on call 
philosophic intuition. 1 It is a sense of what 
is real, concrete, original, living, an art of 
equilibrium and precision, a fine touch for 
complexities, continually feeling like the an- 
tennae of some insects. It contains a certain 
distrust of the logical faculty in respect of 
itself ; it wages incessant war upon intellectual 
automatism, upon ready-made ideas and linear 
deduction ; above all, it is anxious to locate 
and to weigh, without any oversights ; it 
arrests the development of every principle and 
every method at the precise point where too 
brutal an application would offend the delicacy 
of reality ; at every moment it collects the 
whole of our experience and organises it in 
view of the present. It is, in a word, thought 
which keeps its freedom, activity which re- 
mains awake, suppleness of attitude, attention 

1 Cf. an address on Good Sense and Classical Studies, 
delivered by Mr Bergson at the Concours general prize 
distribution, 30th July 1895. 



150 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

to life, an ever-renewed adjustment to suit 
ever-new situations. 

Its revealing virtue is derived from this 
moving contact with fact, and this living effort 
of sympathy. This is what we must tend to 
transpose from the practical to the speculative 
order. 

What, then, will be for us the beginning 
of philosophy? After taking cognisance of 
common utilitarianism, and to emerge from 
the relativity in which it buries us, we seek a 
departure-point, a criterion, something which 
decides the raising of inquiry. Where are we 
to find such a principle, except in the very 
action of thought ; I mean, this time, its action 
of profound life independent of all practical 
aim? We shall thus only be imitating the 
example of Descartes when solving the problem 
of temporary doubt. What we shall term 
return to the immediate, the primitive, the 
pure fact, will be the taking of each perception 
considered as an act lived, a coloured moment 
of the Cogito, and this will be for us a criterion 
and departure-point. 

Let us specify this point. Immediate data 
or primitive data or pure data are appre- 
hended by us under forms of disinterested 
action ; I mean that they are first of all lived 



IMMEDIACY 151 

rather than conceived, that before becoming 
material for science, they appear as moments of 
life ; in brief, that perception of them precedes 
their use. 

It is at this stage previous to language that 
we are by these pure data in intimate com- 
munion with reality itself, and the whole of 
our critical task is to return to them through 
a regressive analysis, the goal of which is 
gradually to make our clear intelligence equal 
to our primordial intuition. The latter al- 
ready constitutes a thought, a preconceptual 
thought which is the intrinsic light of action, 
which is action itself so far as it is luminous. 
Thus there is no question here of restricting 
in any degree the part played by thought, but 
only of distinguishing between the perceptive 
and theoretic functions of mind. 

What is " the image " of which Mr Bergson 
speaks at the beginning of Matter and Mind 
except, when grasped in its first movement, 
the flash of conscious existence " in which the 
act of knowledge coincides with the generating 
act of reality " ? l 

Let us forget all philosophical controversies 
about realism and idealism ; let us try to 

1 Report of the French Philosophical Society, philosophical 
vocabulary, article " Immediate,' ' 



152 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

reconstruct for ourselves a simplicity, a 
virginal and candid glance, freeing us from 
the habits contracted in the course of practi- 
cal life. These then are our " images " : not 
things presented externally, nor states felt 
internally, not portraits of exterior beings nor 
projections of internal moods, but appearances, 
in the etymological sense of the word, appear- 
ances lived simply, without our being distin- 
guished from them, as yet neither subjective 
nor objective, marking a moment of conscious- 
ness previous to the work of reflection, from 
which proceeds the duality of subject and 
object. And such also, in every order, appear 
the " immediate feelings " ; as action in birth, 
previous to language. 1 

Why depart from the immediate thus con- 
ceived as action and life ? Because it is quite 
impossible to do otherwise, for every initial 
fact can be only such a pulsation of conscious- 
ness in its lived act, and the fundamental and 
primitive direction of the least word, were it in 
an enunciation of a problem or a doubt, can only 
be such a direction of life and action. And 
we must certainly accord to this immediacy a 
value of absolute knowledge, since it realises 
the coincidence of being and knowledge. 

1 Cf. Matter and Memory, Foreword to the 7th edition, 



IMMEDIACY 153 

But let us not think that the perception of 
immediacy is simple passive perception, that it 
is sufficient to open our eyes to obtain it, to- 
day when our utilitarian education is completed 
and has passed into the state of habit. There 
is a difference between common experience 
and the initial action of life ; the first is a 
practical limitation of the second. Hence it 
follows that a previous criticism is necessary 
to return from one to the other, a criticism 
always in activity, always open as a way of 
progressive investigation, always ready for the 
reiteration and the renewal of effort. 

In this task of purification there is doubt- 
less always to be feared an illusion of remain- 
ing in the primitive stage. By what criteria, 
by what signs can we recognise that we have 
touched the goal ? Pure fact is shown to be 
such on the one hand because it remains in- 
dependent of all theoretical symbolism, because 
the critique of language allows it to exist thus 
as an indissoluble residue, because we are 
unable not to "live" it, even when we free 
ourselves from the anxiety of utility ; on the 
other hand, because it dominates all systems, 
and imposes itself equally upon them all as 
the common source from which they derive by 
diverging analyses, and in which they become 



154 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

reconciled. Assuredly, to attain it, to ex- 
tricate it, we must appeal to the revelations 
of science, to the exercise of deliberate thought. 
But this employment of analysis against 
analysis does not in any way constitute a 
circle, for it tends only to destroy prejudices 
which have become unconscious : it is a simple 
artifice destined to break off habits and to 
scatter illusions by changing the points of 
view. Once set free, once again become 
capable of direct and simple view, what we 
accept as fact is what bears no trace of syn- 
thetic elaboration. It is true that here a last 
objection presents itself: how shall we think 
this limit, purely given, to any degree at all 
in fact, if it must precede all language ? 

The answer is easy. Why speak thus of 
limit ? This word has two senses : at one 
time it designates a last term in a series of 
approximations, and at another a certain 
internal character of convergence, a certain 
quality of progression. 

Now, it is the second sense only which suits 
the case before us. Immediacy contains no 
matter statically defined, and no thing. The 
notion of fact is quite relative. What is 
jact in one case may become construction 
in another. For example, the percepts of 



IMMEDIACY 155 

common experience are facts for the physicist, 
and constructions for the philosopher ; the 
same applies to a table of numerical results, 
for the scholar who is trying to establish a 
theory, or for the observer and the psychologist. 
We may then conceive a series in which each 
term is fact in relation to those which follow 
it, and constructed in relation to those which 
precede it. The expression " primitive fact " 
then determines not so much a final object 
as a direction of thought, a movement of 
critical retrogression, a journey from the most 
to the least elaborate, and the " contact with 
pure immediacy" is only the effort, more and 
more prolonged, to convert the elements of 
experience into real and profound action. 



Ill 

THEORY OF PERCEPTION 

Of what the work of return to immediacy 
consists, and how the intuition which it calls 
up reveals absolute fact, we shall see by an 
example, if we study more closely a capital 
point of Mr Bergson's philosophy, the theory 
of external perception. 

If the act of perceiving realises the lived 
communion of the subject and object in the 
image, we must admit that here we have the 
perfect knowledge which we wish to obtain 
always : we resign ourselves to conception only 
for want of perception, and our ideal is to 
convert all conception into perception. Doubt- 
less we might define philosophy by this same 
ideal, as an effort to expand our perceptive 
power until we render it capable of grasping 
all the wealth and all the depth of reality at 
a single glance. Too true it is that such an 
ideal remains inaccessible to us. Something, 

156 



THEORY OF PERCEPTION 157 

however, is given us already in aesthetic 
intuition. Mr Bergson has pointed it out 
in some admirable pages, 1 and has explained 
to us also how philosophy pursues an analogous 
end. 2 

But philosophy must be conceived as an art 
implying science and criticism, all experience 
and all reason. It is w T hen we look at meta- 
physics in this way that they become a positive 
order of veritable knowledge. Kant has con- 
clusively established that what lies beyond 
language can only be attained by direct vision, 
not by dialectic progress. His mistake was 
that he afterwards believed such a vision for 
ever impossible ; and whence did this mistake 
arise, if not from the fact that, for his new 
vision, he exacted intuitive faculties quite 
different from those at man's disposal. Here 
again the artist will be our example and model. 
He appeals to no transcendent sense, but de- 
taches common-sense from its utilitarian pre- 
judices. Let us do the same : we shall obtain 
a similar result without laying ourselves open 
to Kant's objections. This work is everywhere 
possible, and it is, pa r excellence, the work of 

1 Laughter, pp. 153— l6l. 

2 First lecture on The Perception of Change, delivered 
at Oxford, 26th May 1911. 



158 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

philosophy: let us try then to sketch it in 
relation to the perception of matter. 

We must distinguish two senses of the word 
"perception." This word means first of all 
simple apprehension of immediacy, grasp of 
primitive fact. When we use it in this sense, 
we will agree to say pure perception. It is 
perhaps in place to see in it nothing but a 
limit which concrete experience never presents 
unmixed, a direction of research rather than 
the possession of a thing. 

However that may be, the first sense is the 
fundamental sense, and what it designates 
must be at the root of all ordinary perception ; 
I mean, of every mental operation which re- 
sults in the construction of a percept : a term 
formed by analogy with concept, representing 
the result of a complex work of analysis and 
synthesis, with judgment from externals. We 
live the images in an act of pure perception, 
whilst the objects of ordinary perception are, 
for example, the bodies of which we speak in 
common language. 

With regard to the relation of the two 
senses which we have just distinguished, 
common opinion seems very precise. It 
might be thus resumed : at the point of 
departure we have simple sensations, similar 



THEORY OF PERCEPTION 159 

to qualitative atoms (this is the part of pure 
perception), and afterwards their arrangement 
into connected systems, which are percepts. 

But criticism does not authorise this manner 
of looking at it. Nowhere does knowledge 
begin by separate elements. Such elements 
are always a product of analysis. So there 
is a problem to solve to regain the basis of 
pure perception which is hidden and obscured 
by our familiar percepts. 

Do not suppose that the solution of this 
problem is easy. One method only is of any 
use : to plunge into reality, to become im- 
mersed in it, in a long-pursued effort to 
assimilate all the records of common-sense 
and positive science. " For we do not obtain 
an intuition of reality, that is to say, an intel- 
lectual sympathy with its inmost content, 
unless we have gained its confidence by long 
companionship with its superficial manifesta- 
tions. And it is not a question merely of 
assimilating the leading facts ; we must 
accumulate and melt them down into such 
an enormous mass that we are sure, in this 
fusion, of neutralising in one another all the 
preconceived and premature ideas which 
observers may have unconsciously allowed 
to form the sediment of their observations. 



160 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

Thus, and only thus, is crude materiality to 
be disengaged from known facts." 1 

A directing principle controls this work and 
reintroduces order and convergence, after 
dispensing with them at the outset ; viz. 
that, contrary to common opinion, percep- 
tion as practised in the course of daily life, 
" natural " perception does not aim at a goal 
of disinterested knowledge, but one of practical 
utility, or rather, if it is knowledge, it is only 
knowledge elaborated in view of action and 
speech. 

Need we repeat here the proofs by which 
we have already established in the most 
positive manner that such is really the mean- 
ing of ordinary perception, the underlying 
reason which causes it to take the place of 
pure perception ? We perceive by habit 
only what is useful to us, what interests us 
practically ; very often, too, we think we 
are perceiving when we are merely inferring, 
as for example when we seem to see a dis- 

1 Introduction to Metaphysics in the Metaphysical and 
Moral Review, January 1903. For the correct interpreta- 
tion of this passage (" intellectual sympathy") it must not 
be forgotten that before Creative Evolution, Mr Bergson 
employed the word "intelligence" in a wider acceptation, 
more akin to that commonly received. 



THEORY OF PERCEPTION 161 

tance in depth, a succession of planes, of 
which in reality we judge by differences of 
colouring or relief. 

Our senses supplement one another. A 
slow education has gradually taught us to 
co-ordinate their impressions, especially those 
of touch to those of vision. 1 

Theoretical forms come between nature and 
us : a veil of symbols envelops reality ; thus, 
finally, we no longer see things themselves, 
we are content to read the labels on them. 

Moreover, our perception appears to analysis 
completely saturated with memories, and that 
in view of our practical insertion in the present. 
I will not come back to this point which has 
been so lucidly explained by Mr Bergson in a 
lecture on Dream 2 and an article on Intel- 
lectual Effort? the reading of which cannot 
be too strongly recommended as an intro- 
duction to the first chapter of Matter and 
Memory, in which further arguments are to 
be found. I will only add one remark, follow- 

1 H. Bergson, Note on the Psychological Origins of Our 
Belief in the Law of Causality. Vol. i. of the Library of the 
International Philosophical Congress, 1900. 

2 Report of the International Psychological Institute, May 
1901. 

3 Philosophical Review, January 1902. 

11 



162 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

ing Mr Bergson, as always : perception is not 
simply contemplation, but consciousness of an 
original visual emotion combined with a com- 
plete group of actions in embryo, gestures in 
outline, and the graze of movement within, 
by which we prepare to grasp the object, 
describe its lines, test its functions, sound 
it, move it, and handle it in a thousand 
ways. 1 

From the preceding observations springs 
the utilitarian and practical nature of common 
perception. Let us attempt now to see of 
what the elaboration which it makes reality 
undergo consists. This time I am summing 
up the fourth chapter of Matter and Memory. 
First of all, we choose between the images, 
emphasising the strong, extinguishing the 
weak, although both have, a priori, the same 
interest for pure knowledge ; we make this 
choice above all by according preference to 
impressions of touch, which are the most useful 
from the practical point of view. This selec- 
tion determines the parcelling up of matter 
into independent bodies, and the artificial 
character of our proceeding is thus made plain. 
Does not science, indeed, conclude in the same 

1 This is attested by the facts of apraxia or psychic blind- 
ness. Cf. Matter and Memory \ chap. ii. 



THEORY OF PERCEPTION 163 

way, showing us — as soon as she frees herself 
even to a small extent from common-sense 
— full continuity re-established by " moving 
strata," and all bodies resolved into station- 
ary waves and knots of intersecting fluxes ? 
Already, then, we shall be nearer pure percep- 
tion if we cease to consider anything but the 
perceptible stuff in which numerically distinct 
percepts are cut. Even there, however, a 
utilitarian division continues. Our senses are 
instruments of abstraction, each of them dis- 
cerning a possible path of action. We may 
say that corporal life functions in the manner 
of an absorbing milieu, which determines the 
disconnected scale of simple qualities by ex- 
tinguishing most of the perceptible radiations. 
In short, the scale of sensations, with its 
numerical aspect, is nothing but the spectrum 
of our practical activity. Commonly we per- 
ceive only averages and wholes, which we 
contract into distinct " qualities." Let us dis- 
engage from this rhythm what is peculiar to 
ourselves. 

Above all, let us strive to disengage ourselves 
from homogeneous space, this substratum of 
fixity, this arbitrary scheme of measurement 
and division, which, to our greater advantage, 
subtends the natural, qualitative, and undivided 



164 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

extension of images. 1 And we shall finally 
have pure perception in so far as it is accessible 
to us. 

There is no disputing the absolute value 
of this pure perception. The impotence of 
speculative reason, as demonstrated by Kant, 
is perhaps, at bottom, only the impotence of 
an intelligence in bondage to certain neces- 
sities of the corporal life, and exercised upon 
a matter which it has had to disorganise for 
the satisfaction of our needs. Our knowledge 
of things is then no longer relative to the 
fundamental structure of our mind, but only 
to its superficial and acquired habits, to the 
contingent form which it takes on from our 
corporal functions and our lower needs. 

The relativity of knowledge is therefore not 
final. In unmaking what our needs have made 
we re-establish intuition in its original purity, 
and resume contact with reality. 2 

That is how things are really presented. 
Here we are confronted by the moving con- 

1 We usually represent homogeneous space as previous 
to the heterogeneous extension of images : as a kind of 
empty room which we furnish with percepts. We must 
reverse this order, and conceive, on the contrary, that 
extension precedes space. 

2 Matter and Memory, p. 203. 



THEORY OF PERCEPTION 165 

tinuity of images. Pure perception is complete 
perception. From it we pass to ordinary per- 
ception by diminution, throwing shadows here 
and there : the reality perceived by common- 
sense is nothing else actually than universal 
interaction rendered visible by its very inter- 
ruption at certain points. 

Whence we have this double conclusion 
already formulated higher up : the relation of 
perception to matter is that of the part to the 
whole, and our consciousness is rather limited 
than relative. It must be stated that primarily 
we perceive things in themselves, not in us; 
the subjectivity of our current perception 
comes from our work of outlining it in the 
bosom of reality, but the root of pure per- 
ception plunges into full objectivity. If, at 
each point of matter, we were to succeed in 
possessing the stream of total interaction of 
which it marks a wave, and if we were to 
succeed in seeing the multiplicity of these 
points as a qualitative heterogeneous flux 
without number or severance, we should coin- 
cide with reality itself. It is true that such 
an ideal, while inaccessible on the one hand, 
would not succeed on the other without risk 
to knowledge ; in fact, says Mr Bergson, 1 " to 

1 Matter and Memory, p. 38. 



166 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

perceive all the influences of all the points of 
all bodies would be to descend to the state of 
material object." 

But a solution of this double difficulty 
remains possible, a dynamic and approximate 
solution, which consists in looking for the 
absolute intuition of matter in such a mobili- 
sation of our perspective faculties that we 
become capable of following, according to 
the circumstances, all the paths of virtual 
perception of which the common anxiety for 
the practical has made us choose one only, and 
capable of realising all the infinitely different 
modes of qualification and discernment. 

But we have still to see how this " complete 
experience " can be practically thought. 



IV 
CRITIQUE OF LANGUAGE 

The perception of reality does not obtain the 
full value of knowledge, except when once 
socialised, once made the common property of 
men, and thereby also tested and verified. 

There is one means only of doing that ; 
viz. to analyse it into manageable and portable 
concepts. By language 1 mean the product 
of this conceptualisation. Thus language is 
necessary ; for we must always speak, were it 
only to utter the impotence of words. Not 
less necessary is a critique of spontaneous 
language, of the laws which govern it, of the 
postulates which it embraces, of the methods 
which convey its implicit doctrines. Synthetic 
forms are actually theories already ; they effect 
an adaptation of reality to the demands of 
practical use. If it is impossible to escape 
them, it is at least fitting not to employ them 
except with due knowledge, and when properly 

167 



168 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

warned against the illusion of the false problems 
which they might arouse. 

Let us first of all consider thought in itself, 
in its concrete life. What are the principal 
characteristics, the essential steps ? We readily 
say, analysis and synthesis. 

Nothing can be known except in contrast, 
correlation, or negation of another thing ; and 
the act of knowledge, considered in itself, is 
unification. Thus number appears as a funda- 
mental category, as an absolute condition of 
intelligibility; some go so far as to regard 
atomism as a necessary method. But that is 
inexact. No doubt the use of number and 
the resulting atomism are imposed by defini- 
tion, we might say, on the thought which 
proceeds by conceptual analysis, and then by 
unifying construction ; that is to say, on syn- 
thetic thought. But, in greater depth, thought 
is dynamic continuity and duration. Its essential 
work does not consist in discerning and after- 
wards in assembling ready-made elements. 
Let us see in it rather a kind of creative 
maturation, and let us attempt to grasp the 
nature of this causal activity. 1 

The act of thought is always a complex play 

1 H. Bergson, Intellectual Effort in the Philosophical 
Review, January 1902. 



CRITIQUE OF LANGUAGE 169 

of moving representations, an evolution of life 
in which incessant inner reactions occur. That 
is to say, it is movement. But there are 
several planes of thought, from intuition to 
language, and we must distinguish between 
the thought which moves on the surface 
among terms displayed on a single plane, and 
the thought which goes deeper and deeper 
from one plane to another. 

We do not think solely by concepts or images ; 
we think, first of all, according to Mr JBergson's 
expression, by dynamic schemes. What is a 
dynamic scheme ? It is motive rather than 
representative, inexpressible in itself, but a 
source of language containing not so much 
the images or concepts in which it will develop 
as the indication of the path to be followed in 
order to obtain them. It is not so much system 
as movement, progress, genesis ; it does not 
mark the gaze directed upon the various 
points of one plane of deliberate contempla- 
tion so much as an effort to pass through 
successive planes of thought in a direction 
leading from intuition to analysis. We might 
define it by its function of calling up images 
and concepts, representations which, for one 
and the same scheme, are neither strictly de- 
termined nor anything in particular in them- 



170 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

selves, concurrent representations which have 
in common one and the same logical power. 

The representations called up form a body- 
to the scheme, and the relation of the scheme 
to the concepts and images which it calls 
up resembles, mutatis mutandis, the relation 
pointed out by Mr Bergson between an idea 
and its basis in the brain. In short, it is 
the very act of creative thought which the 
dynamic scheme interprets, the act not yet 
fixed in "results." 

Nothing is easier than to illustrate the ex- 
istence of this scheme. Let us merely remark 
a few facts of current observation. Recall, for 
example, the suggestive anxiety we experience 
when we seek to remember a name; the 
precise syllables of the name still escape us, 
but we feel them approaching, and already we 
possess something of them, since we immedi- 
ately reject those which do not answer to a 
certain direction of expectancy; and by en- 
deavouring to secure a more intimate feeling 
of this direction we suddenly arouse the desired 
recollection. 

In the same way, what does it mean to have 
the sense of a complex situation in active life, 
if not that we perceive it, not as a static group 
of explicit details, but as a meeting of powers 



CRITIQUE OF LANGUAGE 171 

allied or hostile, convergent or divergent, 
directed towards this or that, of which the 
aggregate whole tends of itself to awaken in 
us the initial reactions which analyse it ? 

In the same way again, how do we learn, 
how can we assimilate a vast system of con- 
cepts or images ? Our task is not to con- 
centrate an enumerative attention on each 
individual factor; we should never get away 
from them, the weight would be too heavy. 

What we entrust to memory is really a 
dynamic scheme permitting us to "regain" 
what we should not have succeeded in "re- 
taining." In reality our only "knowledge" 
is through such a scheme, which contains in 
the state of potential implication an inex- 
haustible multiplicity ready to be developed 
in actual representations. 

How, finally, is any discovery made ? Find- 
ing is solving a problem ; and to solve a 
problem we must always begin by supposing 
it solved. But of what does such a hypothesis 
consist ? 

It is not an anticipated view of the solution, 
for then all would be at an end ; nor is it a 
simple formula putting in the present indi- 
cative what the enunciation expressed in the 
future or the imperative, for then nothing 



172 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

would be begun. It is exactly a dynamic 
scheme ; that is to say, a method in the state 
of directed tension ; and often, the discovery 
once realised as theory or system, capable of 
unending developments and resurrections, 
remains by the best of itself a method and a 
dynamic scheme. 

But one last example will perhaps reveal the 
truth still more. " Anyone who has attempted 
literary composition knows well that when the 
subject has been long studied, all the docu- 
ments collected, all the notes taken, we need, 
to embark on the actual work of composition, 
something more, an effort, often very painful, 
to place oneself suddenly in the very heart 
of the subject, and to seek as deep down as 
possible an impulse to which afterwards we 
shall only have to let ourselves go. This 
impulse, once received, projects the mind on a 
road where it finds both the information which 
it had collected and a thousand other details 
as well ; it develops and analyses itself in 
terms, the enumeration of which would have 
no end ; the further we advance, the more we 
discover ; we shall never succeed in saying 
everything ; and yet, if we turn sharply round 
towards the impulse we feel behind ourselves, 
to grasp it, it escapes ; for it was not a thing 



CRITIQUE OF LANGUAGE 173 

but a direction of movement, and though in- 
definitely extensible, it is simplicity itself." * 

The thought, then, which proceeds from one 
representation to another in one and the same 
plane is one kind ; that which follows one and 
the same conceptual direction through descend- 
ing planes is another. Creative and fertile 
thought is the thought which adopts the second 
kind of work. The ideal is a continual oscilla- 
tion from one plane to the other, a restless 
alternative of intuitive concentration and con- 
ceptual expansion. But our idleness takes 
exception to this, for the feeling of effort 
appears precisely in the traject from the 
dynamic scheme to the images and concepts, 
in the passing from one plane of thought to 
another. 

Thus the natural tendency is to remain in 
the last of these planes, that of language. We 
know what dangers threaten us there. 

Suppose we have some idea or other and the 
word representing it. Do not suppose that to 
this word there is one corresponding sense 
only, nor even a finished group of various 
distinct and rigorously separable senses. On 

1 H. Bergson, Metaphysical and Moral Review, January 
1903. The whole critique of language is implicitly con- 
tained in this Introduction to Metaphysics, 



174 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

the contrary, there is a whole scale correspond- 
ing, a complete continuous spectrum of un- 
stable meanings which tend unceasingly to 
resolve into one another. Dictionaries attempt 
to illuminate them. The task is impossible. 
They co-ordinate a few guiding marks ; but 
who shall say what infinite transitions under- 
lie them? 

A word designates rather a current of 
thought than one or several halts on a logical 
path. Here again a dynamic continuity exists 
previous to the parcelling out of the accepta- 
tions. What, then, should be the attitude of 
mind? 

A supple moving attitude more attentive to 
the curve of change than to the possible halt- 
ing-points along the road. But this is not the 
case at all ; the effort would be too great, and 
what happens, on the contrary, is this. For 
the spectrum a chromatic scale of uniform tints 
is very quickly substituted. This is in itself 
an undesirable simplification, for it is impossible 
to reconstitute the infinity of real shades by 
combinations of fundamental colours each re- 
presenting the homogeneous shore, which each 
region of the spectrum finally becomes. 

However cleverly we proportion these aver- 
ages, we get, at most, some vulgar counterfeit : 



CRITIQUE OF LANGUAGE 175 

orange, for example, is not a mixture of yellow 
and red, although this mixture may recall to 
those who have known it elsewhere the simple 
and original sensation of orange. Again, a 
second simplification, still more undesirable, 
succeeds the first. 

There are no longer any colours at all ; 
black lines serve as guide-marks. We are 
therefore with pure concepts decidedly in full 
symbolism. And it is with symbols that we 
shall henceforward be trying to reconstruct 
reality. 

I need not go back to the general character- 
istics or the inconveniences of this method. 
Concepts resemble photographic views ; con- 
crete thickness escapes them. However 
exact, varied, or numerous we suppose them, 
they can certainly recall their object, but not 
reveal it to any one who had not had any 
direct intuition of it. Nothing is easier than 
to trace the plan of a body in four dimensions ; 
all the same, this drawing does not admit 
" visualisation in space " as is the case with 
ordinary bodies, for want of a previous intuition 
which it would awaken : thus it is with con- 
cepts in relation to reality. Like photographs 
and like plans, they are extracted from reality, 
but we are not able to say that they were 



176 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

contained in it; and many of them besides 
are not so much as extracts ; they are simple 
systematised notes, in fact, notes made upon 
notes. In other terms, concepts do not re- 
present pieces, parts, or elements of reality. 
Literally they are nothing but simple symbolic 
notations. To wish to make integral factors 
of them would be as strange an illusion as that 
of seeing in the co-ordinates of a geometric 
point the constitutive essence of that point. 

We do not make things with symbols, any 
more than we should reconstruct a picture 
with the qualifications which classify it. 

Whence, then, comes the natural inclination 
of thought towards the concept? From the 
fact that thought delights in artifices which 
facilitate analysis and language. 

The first of these artifices is that from 
which results the possibility of decomposition 
or recomposition according to arbitrary laws. 
For that we need a previous substitution of 
symbols for things. Nothing demonstrates 
this better than the celebrated arguments 
which we owe to Zeno of Elea. Mr Bergson 
returns to the discussion of them over and 
over again. 1 

1 Essay on the Immediate Data, pp. 85-86 ; Matter and 
Memory, pp. 211-213 ; Creative Evolution, pp. 333-337. 






CRITIQUE OF LANGUAGE 177 

The nerve of the reasoning there consists in 
the evident absurdity there would be in con- 
ceiving an inexhaustible exhausted, an un- 
achievable achieved ; in short, a total actually- 
completed, and yet obtained by the successive 
addition of an infinite number of terms. 

But the question is to know whether a move- 
ment can be considered as a numerical multi- 
plicity. Virtual divisibility there is, no doubt, 
but not actual division ; divisibility is in- 
definite, whereas an actual division, if it 
respects the inner articulations of reality, is 
bound to halt at a limited number of phases. 

What we divide and measure is the track 
of the movement once accomplished, not the 
movement itself: it is the trajectory, not the 
traject. In the trajectory we can count end- 
less positions ; that is to say, possible halts. 
Let us not suppose that the moving body 
meets these elements all ready-marked. 
Hence what the Eleatic dialectic illustrates 
is a case of incommensurability ; the radical 
inability of analysis to end a certain task ; our 
powerlessness to explain the fact of the transit, 
if we apply to it such and such modes of 
numerical decomposition or recomposition, 
which are valid only for space ; the impossi- 
bility of conceiving becoming as susceptible 

12 



178 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

of being cut up into arbitrary segments, and 
afterwards reconstructed by summing of terms 
according to some law or other ; in short, it is 
the nature of movement, which is without 
division, number, or concept. 

But thought delights in analyses regulated 
by the sole consideration of easy language; 
hence its tendency to an arithmetic and 
geometry of concepts, in spite of the dis- 
astrous consequences ; and thus the Eleatic 
paradox is no less instructive in its specious 
character than in the solution which it 
embodies. 

At bottom, natural thought, I mean thought 
which abandons itself to its double inclination 
of synthetic idleness and useful industry, is a 
thought haunted by anxieties of the operating 
manual, anxieties of fabrication. 

What does it care about the fluxes of reality 
and dynamic depths ? It is only interested in 
the outcrops scattered here and there over the 
firm soil of the practical, and it solidifies 
"terms" like stakes plunged in a moving 
ground. Hence comes the configuration of 
its spontaneous logic to a geometry of solids, 
and hence come concepts, the instantaneous 
moments taken in transitions. 

Scientific thought, again, preserves the same 



CRITIQUE OF LANGUAGE 179 

habits and the same preferences. It seeks 
only what repeats, what can be counted. 
Everywhere, when it theorises, it tends to 
establish static relations between composing 
unities which form a homogeneous and dis- 
connected multiplicity. 

Its very instruments bias it in that direction. 
The apparatus of the laboratory really grasps 
nothing but arrangement and coincidence ; in 
a word, states not transitions. Even in cases of 
contrary appearance, for example, when we 
determine a weight by observing the oscilla- 
tion of a balance and not its rest, we are inter- 
ested in regular recurrence, in a symmetry, in 
something therefore which is of the nature of 
an equilibrium and a fixity all the same. The 
reason of it is that science, like common-sense, 
although in a manner a little different, aims 
only in actual fact at obtaining finished and 
workable results. 

Let us imagine reality under the figure of 
a curve, a rhythmic succession of phases of 
which our concepts mark so many tangents. 
There is contact at one point, but at one 
point only. Thus our logic is valid as infini- 
tesimal analysis, just as the geometry of the 
straight line allows us to define each state of 
curve. It is thus, for example, that vitality 



180 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

maintains a relation of momentary tangency 
to the physico-chemical structure. If we 
study this relation and analogous relations, 
this fact remains indisputably legitimate. Let 
us not think, however, that such a study, even 
when repeated in as many points as we wish, 
can ever suffice. 

We must afterwards by genuine integration 
attain moving continuity. That is exactly the 
task represented by the return to intuition, 
with its proper instrument, the dynamic scheme. 
From this tangential point of view we try to 
grasp the genesis of the curve as envelope, or 
rather, and better still, the birth of successive 
tangents as instantaneous directions. Speak- 
ing non-metaphorically, we cling to genetic 
methods of conceptualisation and proceed 
from the generating principle to its conceptual 
derivatives. 

But our thought finds it very difficult to 
sustain such an effort long. It is partial to 
rectilineal deduction, actual becoming horrifies 
it. It desires immediately to find " things 9% 
sharply determined and very clear. That is 
why immediately a tangent is constructed, it 
follows its movement in a straight line to 
infinity. Thus are produced limit-concepts, 
the ultimate terms, the atoms of language. 



CRITIQUE OF LANGUAGE 181 

As a rule they go in pairs, in antithetic 
couples, every analysis being dichotomy, since 
the discernment of one path of abstraction 
determines in contrast, as a complementary 
remainder, the opposite path of direction. 
Hence, according to the selection effected 
among concepts, and the relative weight which 
is attributed to them, we get the antinomies 
between which a philosophy of analysis must 
for ever remain oscillating and torn in sunder. 
Hence comes the parcelling up of metaphysics 
into systems, and its appearance of regulated 
play " between antagonistic schools which get 
up on the stage together, each to win applause 
in turn." 1 

The method followed to find a genuine 
solution must be inverse ; not dialectic com- 
bination of pre-existing concepts, but, setting 
out from a direct and really lived intuition, a 
descent to ever new concepts along dynamic 
schemes which remain open. From the same 
intuition spring many concepts : " As the wind 
which rushes into the crossroads divides into 
diverging currents of air, which are all only 
one and the same gust." 2 

1 H, Bergson, Report of the French Philosophical Society, 
meeting, 2nd May 1901. 

2 Creative Evolution, p. 55. 



182 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

The antinomies are resolved genetically, 
whilst in the plane of language they remain 
irreducible. With a heterogeneity of shades, 
when we mix the tints and neutralise them by 
one another, we easily create homogeneity ; 
but take the result of this work, that is to say, 
the average final colour, and it will be impossible 
to reconstitute the wealth of the original. 

Do you desire a precise example of the work 
we must accomplish ? Take that of change ; * 
no other is more significant or clearer. It 
shows us two necessary movements in the 
reform of our habits of imagination or 
conception. 

Let us try first of all to familiarise ourselves 
with the images which show us the fixity 
deriving from becoming. 

Two colliding waves, two rollers meeting, 
typify rest by extinction and interference. 
With the movement of a stone, and the 
fluidity of running water, we form the in- 
stantaneous position of a ricochet. The very 
movement of the stone, seen in the successive 
positions of the tangent to the trajectory, is 
stationary to our view. 

What is dynamic stability, except non- 

1 Cf. two lectures delivered by Mr Bergson at Oxford 
on The Perception of Change, 26th and 27th May 1911. 



CRITIQUE OF LANGUAGE 183 

variation arising from variation itself? Equi- 
librium is produced from speed. A man 
running solidifies the moving ground. In 
short, two moving bodies regulated by each 
other become fixed in relation to each other. 

After this, let us try to perceive change in 
itself, and then represent it to ourselves 
according to its specific and original nature. 

The common conception needs reform on 
two principal points : 

(1) All change is revealed in the light of 
immediate intuition, not as a numerical series 
of states, but a rhythm of phases, each of 
which constitutes an indivisible act, in such a 
way that each change has its natural inner 
articulations, forbidding us to break it up 
according to arbitrary laws, like a homo- 
geneous length. 

(2) Change is self-sufficient ; it has no need 
of a support, a moving body, a "thing" in 
motion. There is no vehicle, no substance, no 
spatial receptacle, resembling a theatre-scene, 
no material dummy successively draped in 
coloured stuffs ; on the contrary, it is the 
body or the atom which should be subor- 
dinately defined as symbols of completed 
becoming. 

Of movement thus conceived, indivisible and 



184 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

substantial, what better image can we have 
than a musical evolution, a phrase in melody ? 
That is how we must work to conceive reality. 
If such a conception at first appears obscure, 
let us credit experience, for ideas are gradually 
illuminated by the very use we make of them, 
"the clarity of a concept being hardly any- 
thing, at bottom, but the assurance once 
obtained that we can handle it profitably." 1 

If we require to reach a conception of this 
kind with regard to change, the Eleatic 
dialectic is there to establish it beyond dis- 
pute, and positive science comes to the same 
conclusion, since it shows us everywhere 
nothing but movements placed upon move- 
ments, never fixed " things," except as tempo- 
rary symbols of what we leave at a given 
moment outside the field of study. 

In any case, the difficulty of such a concep- 
tion need not stop us ; it is little more than a 
difficulty of the imaginative order. And as 
for the conception itself, or rather the corre- 
sponding intuition, it will share the fate of all 
its predecessors : to our contemporaries it will 
be a scandal, a century later a stroke of genius, 
after some centuries common evidence, and 
finally an instinctive axiom. 

1 H. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics. 



V 

THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 
DURATION AND LIBERTY 

Armed with the method we have just described, 
Mr Bergson turned first of all toward the 
problem of the ego : taking up his position 
in the centre of mind, he has attempted to 
establish its independent reality by examining 
its profound nature. 

The first chapter of the Essay on the 
Immediate Data contains a decisive criticism 
of the conceptions which claim to introduce 
number and measure into the domain of the 
facts of consciousness. 

Not that it is our business to reject as false 
the notion of psychological intensity ; but this 
notion demands interpretation, and the least 
that we can say against the attempt to turn 
it into a notion of size is that in doing so we 
are misunderstanding the specific character of 
the object studied. The same reproach must 

185 



186 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

be levelled against association of ideas, the 
system of mechanical psychology of which the 
type is presented us by Taine and Stuart Mill. 
Already in chaps, ii. and iii. of the Essay, 
and again all through Matter and Memory, 
the system is riddled with objections, each of 
which would be sufficient to show its radical 
flaw. All the aspects, all the phenomena of 
mental life come up for successive review. In 
respect of each of them we have an illustration 
of the insufficiency of the atomism which 
seeks to recompose the soul with fixed 
elements, by a massing of units exterior to 
one another, everywhere and always the same : 
this is a grammatical philosophy which believes 
reality to be composed of parts which admit 
of number just as language is made of words 
placed side by side ; it is a materialist 
philosophy which improperly transfers the 
proceedings of the physical sciences to the 
sciences of the inner life. 

On the contrary, we must represent the 
state of consciousness to ourselves as variable 
according to the whole of which it forms a 
part. Here and there, although it always 
bears the same name, it is no longer the same 
thing. "The more the ego becomes itself 
again, the more also do its states of con- 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 187 

sciousness, instead of being in juxtaposition, 
penetrate one another, blend with one another, 
and tinge one another with the colouring of 
all the rest. Thus each of us has his manner 
of loving or hating, and this love or hate 
reflect our entire personality." 1 

At bottom Mr Bergson is bringing forward 
the necessity, in the case before us, of 
substituting a new notion of continuous 
qualitative heterogeneity for the old notion 
of numerical and spatial continuity. Above 
all, he is emphasising the still more imperious 
necessity of regarding each state as a phase in 
duration ; and we are here touching on his 
principal and leading intuition, the intuition 
of real duration. 

Historically this was Mr Bergson's starting- 
point and the origin of his thought : a criticism 
of time under the form in which common- 
sense imagines it, in which science employs it. 
He was the first to notice the fact that 
scientific time has no "duration." Our 
equations really express only static relations 
between simultaneous phenomena ; even the 
differential quotients they may contain in 
reality mark nothing but present tendencies ; 
no change would take place in our calculations 

1 Essay on the Immediate Data, pp. 125-126. 



188 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

if the time were given in advance, instan- 
taneously fulfilled, like a linear whole of points 
in numerical order, with no more genuine 
duration than that contained in the numerical 
succession. Even in astronomy there is less 
anticipation than judgment of constancy and 
stability, the phenomena being almost strictly 
periodic, while the hazard of prediction bears 
only upon the minute divergence between the 
actual phenomenon and the exact period 
attributed to it. Notice under what figure 
common-sense imagines time : as an inert 
receptacle, a homogeneous milieu, neutral and 
indifferent ; in fact, a kind of space. 

The scholar makes use of a like image ; for 
he defines time by its measurement, and all 
measurement implies interpretation in space. 
For the scholar the hour is not an interval, 
but a coincidence, an instantaneous arrange- 
ment, and time is resolved into a dust of 
fixities, as in those pneumatic clocks in which 
the hand moves forward in jerks, marking 
nothing but a sequence of pauses, 

Such symbols are sufficient, at least for a 
first approximation, when it is only a question 
of matter, the mechanism of which, strictly 
considered, contains nothing " durable." But in 
biology and psychology quite different charac- 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 189 

teristics become essential ; age and memory, 
heterogeneity of musical phases, irreversible 
rhythm "which cannot be lengthened or 
shortened at will." 1 

Then it is that the return of time becomes 
necessary to duration. How are we to 
describe this duration ? It is a melodious 
evolution of moments, each of which contains 
the resonance of those preceding and announces 
the one which is going to follow ; it is a 
process of enriching which never ceases, and 
a perpetual appearance of novelty ; it is an 
indivisible, qualitative, and organic becoming, 
foreign to space, refractory to number. 

Summon the image of a stream of con- 
sciousness passing through the continuity of 
the spectrum, and becoming tinged succes- 
sively with each of its shades. Or rather 
imagine a symphony having feeling of itself, 
and creating itself; that is how we should 
conceive duration. 

That duration thus conceived is really the 
basis of ourselves Mr Bergson proves by a 
thousand examples, and by a marvellous em- 
ployment of the introspective method which 
he has helped to make so popular. We 
cannot quote these admirable analyses here. 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 10. 



190 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

A single one will serve as model, specially 
selected as referring to one of the most 
ordinary moments of our life, to show plainly 
that the perception of real duration always 
accompanies us in secret. 

" At the moment when I write these lines 
a clock near me is striking the hour ; but my 
distracted ear is only aware of it after several 
strokes have already sounded ; that is, I have 
not counted them. And yet an effort of 
introspective attention enables me to total 
the four strokes already struck and add them 
to those which I hear. If I then withdraw 
into myself and carefully question myself 
about what has just happened, I become 
aware that the first four sounds had struck 
my ear and even moved my consciousness, 
but that the sensations produced by each of 
them, instead of following in juxtaposition, 
had blended into one another in such a way 
as to endow the whole with a peculiar aspect 
and make of it a kind of musical phrase. In 
order to estimate in retrospect the number 
of strokes which have sounded, I attempted 
to reconstitute this phrase in thought: my 
imagination struck one, then two, then three, 
and so long as it had not reached the exact 
number four, my sensibility, on being 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 191 

questioned, replied that the total effect 
differed in quality. It had therefore noted 
the succession of the four strokes in a way of 
its own, but quite otherwise than by addition, 
and without bringing in the image of a 
juxtaposition of distinct terms. In fact, the 
number of strokes struck was perceived as 
quality, not as quantity : duration is thus 
presented to immediate consciousness, and 
preserves this form so long as it does not give 
place to a symbolical representation drawn 
from space." 1 

And now are we to believe that return to 
the feeling of real duration consists in letting 
ourselves go, and allowing ourselves an idle 
relaxation in dream or dissolution in sensation, 
"as a shepherd dozing watches the water flow " ? 
Or are we even to believe, as has been main- 
tained, that the intuition of duration reduces 
" to the spasm of delight of the mollusc basking 
in the sun " ? This is a complete mistake ! 
We should fall back into the misconceptions 
which I was pointing out in connection with 
immediacy in general ; we should be forgetting 
that there are several rhythms of duration, as 
there are several kinds of consciousness ; and 
finally, we should be misunderstanding the 

1 Essay on the Immediate Data, pp. 95-96. 



192 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

character of a creative invention perpetually 
renewed, which is that of our inner life. 

For it is in duration that we are free, not in 
spatialised time, as all determinist conceptions 
suppose in contradiction. 

I shall not go back to the proofs of this 
thesis ; they were condensed some way back 
after the third chapter of the Essay on the 
Immediate Data. But I will borrow from Mr 
JBergson himself a few complementary explana- 
tions, in order, as far as possible, to forestall 
any misunderstanding. "The word liberty" 
he says, "has for me a sense intermediate 
between those which we assign as a rule to 
the two terms liberty and free-will. On one 
hand, I believe that liberty consists in being 
entirely oneself, in acting in conformity with 
oneself; it is then, to a certain degree, the 
' moral liberty ' of philosophers, the indepen- 
dence of the person with regard to everything 
other than itself. But that is not quite this 
liberty, since the independence I am describing 
has not always a moral character. Further, it 
does not consist in depending on oneself as an 
effect depends on the cause which of necessity 
determines it. In this, I should come back to 
the sense of 'free-will. 5 And yet I do not 
accept this sense completely either, since free- 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 193 

will, in the usual meaning of the term, implies 
the equal possibility of two contraries, and on 
my theory we cannot formulate, or even con- 
ceive in this case the thesis of the equal 
possibility of the two contraries, without fall- 
ing into grave error about the nature of time. 
I might say then, that the object of my thesis, 
on this particular point, has been precisely to 
find a position intermediate between 'moral 
liberty' and 'free-will.' Liberty, such as I 
understand it, is situated between these two 
terms, but not at equal distances from both. 
If I were obliged to blend it with one of the 
two, I should select ' free-will.' " 1 

After all, when we place ourselves in the 
perspective of homogeneous time ; that is to 
say, when we substitute for the real and 
profound ego its image refracted through 
space, the act necessarily appears either as the 
resultant of a mechanical composition of 
elements, or as an incomprehensible creation 
ex nihilo. 

" We have supposed that there is a third 
course to pursue ; that is, to place ourselves 
back in pure duration. . . . Then we seemed 
to see action arise from its antecedents by an 

1 Report of the French Philosophical Society, philosophical 
vocabulary, article " Liberty. '' 

13 



194 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

evolution sui generis, in such a way that we 
discover in this action the antecedents which 
explain it, while at the same time it adds 
something absolutely new to them, being an 
advance upon them as the fruit upon the 
flower. Liberty is in no way reduced thereby, 
as has been said, to obvious spontaneity. 
At most this would be the case in the 
animal world, where the psychological life 
is principally that of the affections. But in 
the case of man, a thinking being, the free 
act can be called a synthesis of feelings and 
ideas, and the evolution which leads to it a 
reasonable evolution." 1 

Finally, in a most important letter, 2 Mr 
Bergson becomes a little more precise still. 
We must certainly not confuse the affirmation 
of liberty with the negation of physical de- 
terminism ; " for there is more in this affirma- 
tion than in this negation." All the same, 
liberty supposes a certain contingence. It is 
"psychological causality itself," which must 
not be represented after the model of physical 
causality. 

In opposition to the latter, it implies that 

1 Matter and Memory , p. 205. 

2 Report of the French Philosophical Society, meeting, 26th 
February 1903. 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 195 

between two moments of a conscious being 
there is not an equivalence admitting of 
deduction, that in the transition from one to 
the other there is a genuine creation. With- 
out doubt the free act is not without ex- 
planatory reasons. 

" But these reasons have determined us only 
at the moment when they have become 
determining ; that is, at the moment when 
the act was virtually accomplished, and the 
creation of which I speak is entirely contained 
in the progress by which these reasons have 
become determining." It is true that all this 
implies a certain independence of mental life 
in relation to the mechanism of matter ; and 
that is why Mr Bergson was obliged to set 
himself the problem of the relations between 
body and mind. 

We know that the solution of this problem 
is the principal object of Matter and Memory. 
The thesis of psycho-physiological parallelism 
is there peremptorily refuted. 

The method which Mr Bergson has followed 
to do so will be found set out by himself in 
a communication to the French Philosophical 
Society, which it is important to study as 
introduction. 1 The paralogism included in the 

1 Report of meeting, 2nd May 1901. 



196 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

very enunciation of the parallelist thesis is ex- 
plained in a memoire presented to the Geneva 
International Philosophical Congress in 1904. 1 
But the actual proof is made by the analysis 
of the memoire which fills chaps, ii. and iii. of 
the work cited above. 2 It is there established, 
by the most positive arguments, 3 that all our 
past is self-preserved in us, that this preser- 
vation only makes one with the musical 
character of duration, with the indivisible 
nature of change, but that one part only is 
conscious of it, the part concerned with action, 
to which present conceptions supply a body of 
actuality. 

What we call our present must be con- 
ceived neither as a mathematical point nor 

1 Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, November 1904. 

2 An extremely suggestive resume of these theses will 
be found in the second lecture on The Perception of Change. 

3 Instead of brutally connecting the two extremes of 
matter and mind, one regarded in its highest action, the 
other in its most rudimentary mechanism, thus dooming 
to certain failure any attempt to explain their actual union, 
Mr Bergson studies their living contact at the point of 
intersection marked by the phenomena of perception and 
memory : he compares the higher point of matter — the 
brain — and the lower point of mind — certain recollections 
— and it is between these two neighbouring points that he 
notes a difference, by a method no longer dialectic but 
experimental. 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 197 

as a segment with precise limits : it is the 
moment of our history brought out by our 
attention to life, and nothing, in strict justice, 
would prevent it from extending to the whole 
of this history. It is not recollection then, 
but forgetfulness which demands explanation. 

According to a dictum of Ravaisson, of 
which Mr Bergson makes use, the explana- 
tion must be sought in the body : "it is 
materiality which causes forgetfulness in us." 

There are, in fact, several planes of memory, 
from "pure recollection" not yet interpreted 
in distinct images down to the same recollec- 
tion actualised in embryo sensations and 
movements begun ; and we descend from the 
one to the other, from the life of simple 
"dream" to the life of practical "drama," 
along "dynamic schemes." The last of these 
planes is the body ; a simple instrument of 
action, a bundle of motive habits, a group of 
mechanisms which mind has set up to act. 
How does it operate in the work of memory ? 
The task of the brain is every moment to 
thrust back into unconsciousness all that part 
of our past which is not at the time useful. 
Minute study of facts shows that the brain is 
employed in choosing from the past, in dimin- 
ishing, simplifying, and extracting from it all 



198 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

that can contribute to present experience ; but 
it is not concerned to preserve it. In short, 
the brain can only explain absences, not 
presences. That is why the analysis of 
memory illustrates the reality of mind, and 
its independence relative to matter. Thus is 
determined the relation of soul to body, the 
penetrating point which it inserts and drives 
into the plane of action. "Mind borrows 
from matter perceptions from which it derives 
its nourishment, and gives them back to it 
in the form of movement, on which it has 
impressed its liberty." 1 

This, then, is how the cycle of research 
closes, by returning to the initial problem, the 
problem of perception. In the two opposing 
systems by which attempts have been made 
to solve it, Mr Bergson discovers a common 
postulate, resulting in a common impotence. 
From the idealistic point of view we do not 
succeed in explaining how a world is expressed 
externally, nor from the realistic point of view 
how an ego is expressed internally. And this 
double failure comes again from the under- 
lying hypothesis, according to which the duality 
of the subject and object is conceived as pri- 
mitive, radical, and static. Our duty is dia- 

1 Matter and Memory, p. 279. 



THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 199 

metrically opposed. We have to consider 
this duality as gradually elaborated, and the 
problem concerning it must be first stated, 
and then solved as a function of time rather 
than of space. Our representation begins by 
being impersonal, and it is only later that 
it adopts our body as centre. We emerge 
gradually from universal reality, and our 
realising roots are always sunk in it. But this 
reality in itself is already consciousness, and 
the first moment of perception always puts us 
back into the initial state previous to the 
separation of the subject and object. It is by 
the work of life, and by action, that this separ- 
ation is effected, created, accentuated, and 
fixed. And the common mistake of realism 
and idealism is to believe it effected in advance, 
whereas it is relatively second to perception. 

Hence comes the absolute value of immedi- 
ate intuition. For from what source could an 
irreducible relativity be produced in it? It 
would be absurd to make it depend on the 
constitution of our brain, since our brain itself, 
so far as it is a group of images, is only a part 
of the universe, presenting the same character- 
istics as the whole ; and in so far as it is a group 
of mechanisms become habits, is only a result 
of the initial action of life, of original 



200 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

perceptive discernment. And, on the other 
hand, no less absurd would be the fear that 
the subject can ever be excluded or elimi- 
nated from its own knowledge, since, in reality, 
the subject, like the object, is in perception, 
not perception in the subject — at least not 
primitively. So that it is by a trick of speech 
that the theses of fundamental relativity 
take root: they vanish when we return to 
immediacy ; that is to say, when we present 
problems as they ought to be presented, in 
terms which do not suppose any conceptual 
analysis yet accomplished. 



VI 

THE PROBLEM OF EVOLUTION: 
LIFE AND MATTER 

After the problem of consciousness Mr 
Bergson was bound to approach that of 
evolution, for psychological liberty is only 
truly conceivable if it begins in some meas- 
ure with the first pulsation of corporal life. 
" Either sensation has no raison d'etre or it is 
a beginning of liberty " ; that is what the 
Essay on the Immediate Data * already told us. 

It was easy then to foresee the necessity 
of a general theoretical frame in which our 
duration might take a position which would 
render it more intelligible by removing its 
appearance of singular exception. 

Thus in 1901, I wrote 2 with regard to the 
new philosophy considered as a philosophy of 
becoming : " It has been prepared by contem- 

1 Page 25. 

2 Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, May 1901. 

201 



202 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

porary evolution, which it investigates and 
perfects, sifting it from its ore of materialism, 
and turning it into genuine metaphysics. Is 
not this the philosophy suited to the century 
of history ? Perhaps it indicates that a period 
has arrived in which mathematics, losing its 
role as the regulating science, is about to give 
place to biology." This is the programme 
carried out, in what an original manner we 
are well aware, by the doctrine of Creative 
Evolution. 

When we examine ancient knowledge, one 
characteristic of it is at once visible. It 
studies little but certain privileged moments 
of changing reality, certain stable forms, 
certain states of equilibrium. Ancient geo- 
metry, for example, is almost always limited 
to the static consideration of figures already 
traced. Modern science is quite different. 
Has not the greatest progress which it has 
realised in the mathematical order really been 
the invention of infinitesimal analysis ; that is 
to say, an effort to substitute the process for 
the resultant, to follow the moving generation 
of phenomena and magnitudes in its contin- 
uity, to place oneself along becoming at any 
moment whatsoever, or rather, by degrees at 
all successive moments? This fundamental 



THE PROBLEM OF EVOLUTION 203 

tendency, coupled with the development of 
biological research, was bound to incline it 
towards a doctrine of evolution ; and hence 
the success of Spencer. 

But time, which is everywhere in modern 
science the chief variable, is only a time-length, 
indefinitely and arbitrarily divisible. There is 
no genuine duration, nothing really tending 
to evolution in Spencer's evolution : no more 
than there is in the periodic working of a 
turbine or in the stationary tremble of a 
diapason. Is not this what is emphasised 
by the perpetual employment of mechanical 
images and vulgar engineering metaphors, 
the least fault of which is to suppose a homo- 
geneous time, and a motionless theatre of 
change which is at bottom only space ? "In 
such a doctrine we still talk of time, we pro- 
nounce the word, but we hardly think of the 
thing ; for time is here robbed of all effect. ni 

Whence comes a latent materialism, ready 
to grasp the chance of self-expression. 
Whence the automatic return to the dream 
of universal arithmetic, which Laplace, Du 
Bois-Reymond, and Huxley have expressed 
with such precision. 2 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 42. 

2 Ibid.,?. 41. 



204 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

In order to escape such consequences we 
must, with Mr Bergson, reintroduce real dura- 
tion, that is to say, creative duration into 
evolution, we must conceive life according to 
the mode exhibited with regard to change in 
general. And it is science itself which calls us 
to this task. What does science actually tell 
us when we let it speak instead of prescribing 
to it answers which conform to our preferences ? 
Vitality, at every point of its becoming, is a 
tangent to physico-chemical mechanism. But 
physico-chemistry does not reveal its secret 
any more than the straight line produces the 
curve. 

Consider the development of an embryo. 
It summarises the history of species; onto- 
genesis, we are told, reproduces phylogenesis. 
And what do we observe then ? 

Now that a long sequence of centuries is 
contracted for us into a short period, and that 
our view is thus capable of a synthesis which 
before was too difficult, we see appearing the 
rhythmic organisation, the musical character, 
which the slowness of the transitions at first 
prevented us from seeing. In each state of 
the embryo there is something besides an 
instantaneous structure, something besides a 
conservative play of actions and reactions ; 



THE PROBLEM OF EVOLUTION 205 

there is a tendency, a direction, an effort, 
a creative activity. The stage traversed is 
less interesting than the traversing itself; this 
again is an act of generating impulse, rather 
than an effect of mechanical inertia. So must 
the case be, by analogy, with general evolu- 
tion. We have there, as it were, a vision of 
biological duration in miniature; expansion 
and relaxation of its tension bring its homo- 
geneity to notice, but at the same time, 
properly speaking, evolution disappears. 

And further, Mr Bergson establishes by 
direct and positive arguments that life is 
genuine creation. A similar conclusion is 
presented as the envelope of his whole 
doctrine. 

It is imposed first of all by immediate 
evidence, for we cannot deny that the history 
of life is revealed to us under the aspect of a 
progress and an ascent. And this impulse 
implies initiative and choice, constituting an 
effort which we are not authorised by the 
facts to pronounce fatalistic : "A simple glance 
at the fossil species shows us that life could 
have done without evolution, or could have 
evolved only within very restricted limits, had 
it chosen the far easier path open to it of 
becoming cramped in its primitive forms; 



206 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

certain Foraminifera have not varied since 
the silurian period ; the Lingular looking 
unmoved upon the innumerable revolutions 
which have upheaved our planet, are to-day 
what they were in the most distant times 
of the palaeozoic era." 1 Moreover, if, in us, 
life is indisputably creation and liberty, how 
would it not, to some extent, be so in 
universal nature ? " Whatever be the in- 
most essence of what is and what is being 
made, we are of it : 2 a conclusion by analogy 
is therefore legitimate. But, above all, this 
conclusion is verified by its aptitude for 
solving problems of detail, and for taking 
account of observed facts ; and in this respect 
1 regret that I can only refer the reader to 
the whole body of admirable discussions and 
analyses drawn up by Mr Bergson with regard 
to "the plant and the animal," or "the 
development of animal life." 3 

As regards matter, two main laws stand out 
from the whole of our science, relative to its 
nature and its phenomena : a law of conserva- 
tion and a law of degradation. On the one 
hand, we have mechanism, repetition, inertia, 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 111. 

2 Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, November 1£U 1. 

3 Creative Evolution, chap. ii. 



THE PROBLEM OF EVOLUTION 207 

constants, and invariants : the play of the 
material world, from the point of view of 
quantity, offers us the aspect of an immense 
transformation without gain or loss, a homo- 
geneous transformation tending to maintain in 
itself an exact equivalence between the de- 
parture and arrival point. On the other hand, 
from the point of view of quality, we have 
something which is being used up, lowered, 
degraded, exhausted : energy expended, move- 
ment dissipated, constructions breaking up, 
weights falling, levels becoming equalised, and 
differences effaced. The travel of the material 
world appears then as a loss, a movement of 
fall and descent. 

In addition, there is only a tendency to 
conservation, a tendency which is never realised 
except imperfectly ; while, on the contrary, 
we notice that the failure of the vital impulse 
is most infallibly interpreted by the appearance 
of mechanism. Reality falling asleep or break- 
ing up is the figure under which we finally 
observe matter : matter then is secondary. 

Finally, according to Mr Bergson, matter is 
defined as a kind of descent ; this descent as 
the interruption of an ascent ; this ascent itself 
as growth ; and thus a principle of creation is 
at the base of things. 



208 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

Such a view seems obscure and disturbing 
to the mathematical understanding. It can- 
not accustom itself to the idea of a becoming 
which is more than a simple change of distri- 
bution, and more than a simple expression of 
latent wealth. When confronted with such 
an idea, it always harks back to its eternal 
question: How has something come out of 
nothing ? The question is false ; for the idea 
of nothing is only a pseudo-idea. Nothing is 
unthinkable, since to think nothing is neces- 
sarily to think or not to think something ; and 
according to Mr Bergson's formula, 1 "the 
representation of void is always a full repre- 
sentation." When I say : " There is nothing," 
it is not that I perceive a "nothing." I never 
perceive except what is. But I have not per- 
ceived what I was seeking, what I was expect- 
ing, and I express my deception in the language 
of my desire. Or else I am speaking a language 
of construction, implying that I do not yet 
possess what I intend to make. 

Let us abruptly forget these idols of practical 
action and language. The becoming of evolu- 
tion will then appear to us in its true light, 
as phases of gradual maturation, rounded at 

1 Cf. the discussion on existence and non-existence in 
chap. iv. of Creative Evolution, pp. 298-322. 



THE PROBLEM OF EVOLUTION 209 

intervals by crises of creative discovery. Con- 
tinuity and discontinuity will thus admit pos- 
sibility of reconciliation, the one as an aspect 
of ascent towards the future, the other as an 
aspect of retrospection after the event. And 
we shall see that the same key will in addition 
disclose to us the theory of knowledge. 



14 



VII 

THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE: 
ANALYSIS AND INTUITION 

We know what importance has been attached 
since Kant to the problem of reason : it would 
seem sometimes that all future philosophy is a 
return to it ; that it is no longer called to speak 
of anything else. Besides, what we understand 
by reason, in the broad sense, is, in the human 
mind, the power of light, the essential operation 
of which is defined as an act of directing syn- 
thesis, unifying the experience and rendering 
it by that very fact intelligible. Every move- 
ment of thought shows this power in exercise. 
To bring it everywhere to the front would be 
the proper task of philosophy ; at least it is 
in this manner that we understand it to-day. 
But from what point of view and by what 
method do we ordinarily construct this theory 
of knowledge ? 

The spontaneous works of mind, perception, 

210 



THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 211 

science, art, and morality are the departure- 
point of the inquiry and its initial matter. 
We do not ask ourselves whether but how they 
are possible, what they imply, and what they 
suppose ; a regressive analysis attempts by 
critical reflection to discern in them their 
principles and requisites. The task, in short, 
is to reascend from production to producing 
activity, which we regard as sufficiently re- 
vealed by its natural products. 

Philosophy, in consequence, is no longer 
anything but the science of problems already 
solved, the science which is confined to saying 
why knowledge is knowledge and action action, 
of such and such a kind, and such and such a 
quality. And in consequence also reason can 
no longer appear anything but an original 
datum postulated as a simple fact, as a 
complete system come down ready-made from 
heaven, at bottom a kind of non-temporal 
essence, definable without respect to duration, 
evolution, or history, of which all genesis and 
all progress are absurd. In vain do we persist 
in maintaining that it is originally an act ; we 
always come round to the fact that the method 
followed compels us to consider this act only 
when once accomplished, and when once 
expressed in results. The inevitable con- 



212 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

sequence is that we imprison ourselves hope- 
lessly in the affirmation of Kantian relativism. 

Such a system can only be true as a partial 
and temporary truth : at the most, it is a 
moment of truth. " If we read the Critique of 
Pure Reason closely, we become aware that 
Kant has made the critique, not of reason 
in general, but of a reason fashioned to the 
habits and demands of Cartesian mechanism or 
Newtonian physics." 1 Moreover, he plainly 
studies only adult reason, its present state, a 
plane of thought, a sectional view of becoming. 
For Kant, men progress perhaps in reason, but 
reason itself has no duration : it is the fixed 
spot, the atmosphere of dead eternity in which 
every mental action is displayed. But this 
could not be the final and complete truth. Is 
it not a fact that human intelligence has been 
slowly constituted in the course of biological 
evolution ? To know it, we have not so much 
to separate it statically from its works, as to 
replace it in its history. 

Let us begin with life, since, in any case, 
whether we will or no, it is always in life and 
by life that we are. 

Life is not a brute force, a blind mechanism, 

1 H. Bergson, Report of French Philosophical Society, 
meeting, 2nd May 1901. 



THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 213 

from which one could never conceive that 
thought would spring. From its first pulsa- 
tion, life is consciousness, spiritual activity, 
creative effort tending towards liberty ; that is, 
discernment already luminous, although the 
quality is at first faint and diffused. In other 
terms, life is at bottom of the psychological 
nature of a tendency. But " the essence of a 
tendency is to develop in sheaf-form, creating, 
by the mere fact of its growth, diverging 
directions between which its impulse will be 
divided." 1 

Along these different paths the comple- 
mentary potentialities are produced and 
intensified, separating in the very process, their 
original interpretation being possible only in 
the state of birth. One of them ends in what 
we call intelligence. This latter therefore has 
become gradually detached from a less intense 
but fuller luminous condition, of which it 
has retained only certain characteristics to 
accentuate them. 

We see that we must conceive the word 
mind — or, if we prefer the word, thought — as 
extending beyond intelligence. Pure intelli- 
gence, or the faculty of critical reflection 
and conceptual analysis, represents only one 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 108. 



214 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

form of thought in its entirety, a function, a 
determination or particular adaptation, the 
part organised in view of practical action, the 
part consolidated as language. What are its 
characteristics ? It understands only what is 
discontinuous, inert, and fixed, that which has 
neither change nor duration ; it bathes in an 
atmosphere of spatiality ; it uses mathematics 
continually ; it feels at home only among 
"things," and everything is reduced by it to 
solid atoms ; it is naturally " materialist," 
owing to the very fact that it naturally grasps 
"forms" only. What do we mean by that 
except that its object of election is the 
mechanism of matter ? But it supposes life ; 
it only remains living itself by continual loans 
from a vaster and fuller activity from which it 
is sprung. And this return to complementary 
powers is what we call intuition. 

From this point of view it becomes easy to 
escape Kantian relativity. We are confronted 
by an intelligence which is doubtless no longer 
a faculty universally competent, but which, on 
the contrary, possesses in its own domain a 
greater power of penetration. It is arranged 
for action. Now action would not be able to 
move in irreality. Intelligence, then, makes 
us acquainted, if not with all reality, at least 



THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 215 

with some of it, namely that part by which 
reality is a possible object of mechanical or 
synthetic action. 

More profoundly, intuition falls into analysis 
as life into matter : they are two aspects of 
the same movement. That is why, " provided 
we only consider the general form of physics, 
we can say that it touches the absolute." 1 

In other terms, language and mechanism 
are regulated by each other. This explains at 
once the success of mathematical science in 
the order of matter, and its non-success in the 
order of life. 

For, when confronted with life, intelligence 
fails. "Being a deposit of the evolutive 
movement along its path, how could it be 
applied throughout the evolutive movement 
itself ? We might as well claim that the part 
equals the whole, that the effect can absorb 
its cause into itself, or that the pebble left on 
the shore outlines the form of the wave which 
brought it." 2 

Is not that as good as saying that life is 
unknowable ? Must we conclude that it is 
impossible to understand it ? 

" We should be forced to do so, if life 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 21 6. 

2 Preface to Creative Evolution. 



~zai 



216 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

had employed all the psychic potentialities it 
contains in making pure understandings ; that 
is to say, in preparing mathematicians. But 
the line of evolution which ends in man is not 
the only one. By other divergent ways other 
forms of consciousness have developed, which 
have not been able to free themselves from 
external constraint, nor regain the victory 
over themselves as intelligence has done, but 
which, none the less for that, also express 
something immanent and essential in the 
movement of evolution. 

" By bringing them into connection with one 
another, and making them afterwards amalga- 
mate with intelligence, should we not thus 
obtain a consciousness co-extensive with life, 
and capable, by turning sharply round upon 
the vital thrust which it feels behind it, of 
obtaining a complete, though doubtless vanish- 
ing vision ? " 1 It is precisely in this that the 
act of philosophic intuition consists. "We 
shall be told that, even so, we do not get beyond 
our intelligence, since it is with our intelligence, 
and through our intelligence, that we observe 
all the other forms of consciousness. And we 
should be right in saying so, if we were pure 
intelligences, if there had not remained round 

1 Creative Evolution, Preface, 



THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 217 

our conceptual and logical thought a vague 
nebula, made of the very substance at the 
expense of which the luminous nucleus, which 
we call intelligence, has been formed. In it 
reside certain complementary powers of the 
understanding, of which we have only a 
confused feeling when we remain shut up in 
ourselves, but which will become illumined 
and distinct when they perceive themselves at 
work, so to speak, in the evolution of nature. 
They will thus learn what effort they have to 
make to become more intense, and to expand 
in the actual direction of life." 1 Does that 
mean abandonment to instinct, and descent 
with it into infra-consciousness again ? By no 
means. On the contrary, our task is to bring 
instinct to enrich intelligence, to become free 
and illumined in it ; and this ascent towards 
super-consciousness is possible in the flash of 
an intuitive act, as it is sometimes possible for 
the eye to perceive, as a pale and fugitive 
gleam, beyond what we properly term light, 
the ultra-violet rays of the spectrum. 

Can we say of such a doctrine that it seeks 
to go, or that it goes " against intelligence " ? 
Nothing authorises such an accusation, for 
limitation of a sphere is not misappreciation of 

1 Creative Evolution, Preface. 



218 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

every legitimate exercise. But intelligence is 
not the whole of thought, and its natural 
products do not completely exhaust or mani- 
fest our power of light. 

Besides, that intelligence and reason are not 
things completed, for ever arrested in their 
inner structure, that they evolve and expand, 
is a fact: the place of discovery is precisely 
the residual fringe of which we were speaking 
above. In this respect, the history of thought 
would furnish examples in plenty. Intuitions 
at first obscure, and only anticipated, facts 
originally admitting no comparison, and as it 
were irrational, become instructive and luminous 
by the fruitful use made of them, and by the 
fertility which they manifest. In order to 
grasp the complex content of reality, the mind 
must do itself violence, must awaken its sleep- 
ing powers of revealing sympathy, must expand 
till it becomes adapted to what formerly shocked 
its habits so much as almost to seem contradic- 
tory to it. Such a task, moreover, is possible : 
we work out its differential every moment, and 
its complete whole appears in the sequence of 
centuries. 

At bottom, the new theory of knowledge 
has nothing new in it except the demand 
that all the facts shall be taken into account : 



THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 219 

it renews duration in the thinking mind, and 
places itself at the point of view of creative 
invention, not only at that of subsequent 
demonstration. Hence its conception of ex- 
perience, which, for it, is not simple infor- 
mation, fitted into pre-existing frames, but 
elaboration of the frames themselves. 

Hence the problem of reason changes its 
aspect. A great mistake has been made in 
thinking that Mr Bergson's doctrine mis- 
understands it : to deny it and to place it are 
two different things. In its inmost essence, 
reason is the demand for unity ; that is why 
it is displayed as a faculty of synthesis, and 
why its essential act is presented as appercep- 
tion of relation. It is unifying activity, not so 
much by a dialectic of harmonious construction 
as by a view of reciprocal implication. But 
all that, however shaded we suppose it, entails 
a previous analysis. Therefore if we place 
ourselves in a perspective of intuition, I mean, 
of complete perception, the demand for reason 
appears second only, without being deprived, 
however, of its true task : it is an echo and 
a recollection, an appeal and a promise of 
profound continuity, our original anticipation 
and our final hope, in the bosom of the 
elementary atomism which characterises the 



220 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

transitory region of language ; and reason thus 
marks the zone of contact between intelligence 
and instinct. 

Is thought only possible under the law of 
number ? Does reality only become an object 
of knowledge as a system of distinct but 
regulated factors and moments ? Do ideas 
exist only by their mutual relations, which 
first of all oppose them and afterwards force 
intelligence to move endlessly from one term 
to another? If such were the case, reason 
would certainly be first, as alone making an 
intelligible continuity out of discontinuous 
perception and restoring total unity to each 
temporary part by a synthetic dialectic. But 
all this really has meaning only after analysis 
has taken place. The demand for rational 
unity constitutes in the bosom of atomism 
something like a murmur of deep underlying 
continuity : it expresses in the very language 
of atomism, atomism's basic irreality. There 
is no question of misunderstanding reason, but 
only of putting it in its proper place. In a 
perspective of complete intuition nothing 
would require to be unified. Keason would 
then be reabsorbed in perception. That is 
to say, its present task is to measure and 
correct in us the limits, gaps, and weaknesses 



THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 221 

of the perceptive faculty. In this respect not 
a man of us thinks of denying it its task. But 
we try with Mr Bergson to reduce this task to 
its true worth and genuine importance. For 
we are decidedly tired of hearing " Reason " 
invoked in solemn and moving tones, as if 
to write the venerable name with the largest 
of capital R's were a magic solution of all 
problems. 

Mind, in fact, sets out from unity rather 
than arrives at it ; and the order which it 
appears to discover subsequently in an ex- 
perience which at first is manifold and in- 
coherent is only a refraction of the original 
unity through the prism of a spontaneous 
analysis. Mr Bergson admirably points out 1 
that there are two types of order, geometric 
and vital, the one a static hierarchy of relations, 
the other a musical continuity of moments. 
These two types are opposed, as space to 
duration and matter to mind ; but the nega- 
tion of one coincides with the position of the 
other. It is therefore impossible to abolish 
both at once. The idea of disorder does not 
correspond to any genuine reality. It is 
essentially relative, and arises only when we 
do not meet the type of order which we were 

1 Creative Evolution, pp. 240-244 and 252-257. 






222 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

expecting ; and then it expresses our deception 
in the language of our expectation, the absence 
of the expected order being equivalent, from 
the practical point of view, to the absence of 
all order. Regarded in itself, this notion is 
only a verbal entity, unduly taking form as 
the common basis of two antithetic types. 
How therefore do we come to speak of a 
" perceptible diversity" which mind has to 
regulate and unify? This is only true at 
most of the disjointed experience employed 
by common-sense. Reason, accepting this 
preliminary analysis, and proceeding to 
language, seeks to organise it according to 
the mathematical type. But it is the vital 
type which corresponds to absolute reality, at 
least when it is a question of the Whole ; and 
only intuition has re-access to it, by soaring 
above synthetic dissociations. 



<■ ■ —, i g 



VIII 
CONCLUSION 

As my last word and closing formula I come 
back to the leitmotiv of my whole study: 
Mr Bergsons philosophy is a philosophy of 
duration. 

Let us regard it from this point of view, 
as contact with creative effort, if we wish to 
conceive aright the original notions which it 
proposes to us about liberty, life, and intuition. 

Let us say once more that it appears as the 
enthronement of positive metaphysics : positive, 
that is to say, capable of continuous, regular, 
and collective progress, no longer forcibly 
divided into irreducible schools, " each of 
which retains its place, chooses its dice, and 
begins a never-ending match with the rest." 1 

1 Introduction to Metaphysics in the Revue de Metaphysique 
et de Morale, January 1903. Psychology, according to Mr 
Bergson, studies the human mind in so far as it operates 
in a useful manner to a practical end ; metaphysics repre- 

223 



224 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

Let us next say that until the present 
moment it constitutes the only doctrine which 
is truly a metaphysic of experience, since no 
other, at bottom, explains why thought, in its 
work of discovery and verification, remains in 
subjection to a law of probation by durable 
action. We have now only to show how it 
evades certain criticisms which have been 
levelled against its tendencies. 

Some have wanted to see in it a kind of 
atheist monism. Mr Bergson has answered 
this point himself. What he rejects, and what 
he is right in rejecting, are the doctrines which 
confine themselves to personifying the unity of 
nature or the unity of knowledge in God as 
motionless first cause. God would really be 
nothing, since he would do nothing. But he 
adds : " The considerations put forward in 
my Essay on the Immediate Data result in an 
illustration of the fact of liberty ; those of 
Matter and Memory lead us, I hope, to put 
our finger on mental reality ; those of Creative 

sent the effort of this same mind to free itself from the 
conditions of useful action, and regain possession of itself 
as pure creative energy. Now experience, the experience 
of the laboratory, allows us to measure with more and 
more accuracy the divergence between these two planes of 
life ; hence the positive character of the new metaphysics. 



— 



CONCLUSION 225 

Evolution present creation as a fact : from all 
this we derive a clear idea of a free and creating 
God, producing matter and life at once, whose 
creative effort is continued, in a vital direction, 
by the evolution of species and the construction 
of human personalities." 1 How can we help 
finding in these words, according to the actual 
expression of the author, the most categorical 
refutation "of monism and pantheism in 
general " ? 

Now, to go further and become more precise, 
Mr Bergson points out that we must "approach 
problems of quite a different kind, those of 
morality." About these new problems the 
author of Creative Evolution has as yet said 
nothing ; and he will say nothing, so long as 
his method does not lead him, on this point, to 
results as positive, after their manner, as those 
of his other works, because he does not consider 
that mere subjective opinions are in place in 
philosophy. He therefore denies nothing ; he 
is waiting and searching, always in the same 
spirit : what more could we ask of him ? 

One thing only is possible to-day : to discern 
in the doctrine already existing the points of a 

1 Letter to P. de Tonquedec, published in the Studies of 
20th February 1912, and quoted here as found in the 
Annals of Christian Philosophy, March 1912. 

15 



A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

moral and religious philosophy which present 
themselves in advance for ultimate insertion. 

This is what we are permitted to attempt. 
But let us fully understand what is at issue. 
The question is only to know whether, as has 
been claimed, there is incompatibility between 
Mr Bergson's point of view and the religious 
or moral point of view ; whether the premisses 
laid down block the road to all future develop- 
ment in the direction before us ; or whether, on 
the contrary, such a development is invited by 
some parts at least of the previous work. The 
question is not to find in this work the necessary 
and sufficient bases, the already formed and 
visible lineaments of what will one day com- 
plete it. To imagine that the religious and 
moral problem is bound to be regarded by Mr 
Bergson as arising when it is too late for re- 
vision, as admitting proposition and solution 
only as functions of a previous theoretical 
philosophy beyond which we should not go ; 
that in his eyes the solution of this problem 
will be deduced from principles already laid 
down without any call for the introduction of 
new facts or new points of view, without any 
need to begin from a new intuition ; that his 
view precludes all considerations of strictly 
spiritual life, of inner and profound action, 



CONCLUSION 227 

regarding things in relation to God and in an 
eternal perspective: such a view would be 
illegitimate and unreasonable, first of all, 
because Mr Bergson has said nothing of the 
kind, and secondly, because it is contrary to all 
his tendencies. 

After the Essay on the Immediate Data 
critics proceeded to confine him in an irre- 
ducible static dualism ; after Matter and 
Memory they condemned him as failing for 
ever to explain the juxtaposition of the two 
points of view, utility and truth : why should 
we require that after Creative Evolution he 
should be forbidden to think anything new, or 
distinguish, for example, different orders of 
life? 

The problems must be approached one after 
the other, and, in the solution of each of them, 
it is proper to introduce only the necessary 
elements. But each result is only "tempo- 
rarily final." Let us lose the strange habit of 
asking an author continually to do something 
other than he has done, or, in what he has 
done, to give us the whole of his thought. 

Till now, Mr Bergson has always considered 
each new problem according to its specific and 
original nature, and, to solve it, he has always 
supplied a new effort of autonomous adapta- 



228 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

tion 2 why should it be otherwise for the 
future? 1 seek vainly for the decree forbid- 
ding him the right to study the problem of 
biological evolution in itself, and for the 
necessity which compels him to abide now by 
the premisses contained in his past work. 1 

The only point which we have to examine 
is this : will the moral and religious question 
compel Mr Bergson to break with the con- 
clusions of his previous studies, and can we 
not, on the contrary, foresee points of general 
agreement ? 

In the depths of ourselves we find liberty ; 
in the depths of universal being we find a 
demand for creation. Since evolution is crea- 
tive, each of its moments works for the pro- 
duction of an indeducible and transcendent 
future. This future must not be regarded as 
a simple development of the present, a simple 
expression of germs already given. Conse- 
quently we have no authority for saying that 
there is for ever only one order of life, only 
one plane of action, only one rhythm of 
duration, only one perspective of existence. 
And if disconnections and abrupt leaps are 

1 For Mr Bergson, the religious sentiment, as the senti- 
ment of obligation, contains a basis of u immediate datum " 
rendering it indissoluble and irreducible. 



CONCLUSION 229 

visible in the economy of the past — from matter 
to life, from the animal to man — we have no 
authority again for claiming that we cannot 
observe to-day something analogous in the 
very essence of human life, that the point of 
view of the flesh, and the point of view of the 
spirit, the point of view of reason, and the 
point of view of charity are a homogeneous 
extension of it. And apart from that, taking 
life in its first tendency, and in the general 
direction of its current, it is ascent, growth, 
upward effort, and a work of spiritualising and 
emancipating creation: by that we might 
define Good, for Good is a path rather than 
a thing. 

But life may fail, halt, or travel downwards. 
" Life in general is mobility itself ; the parti- 
cular manifestations of life accept this mobility 
only with regret, and constantly fall behind. 
While it is always going forward, they would 
be glad to mark time. Evolution in general 
would take place as far as possible in a straight 
line; special evolution is a circular advance. 
Like dust-eddies raised by the passing wind, 
living bodies are self-pivoted and hung in the 
full breeze of life." 1 Each species, each indi- 
vidual, each function tends to take itself as its 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 139. 



230 A NEW PHILOSOPHY 

end ; mechanism, habit, body, and letter, which 
are, strictly speaking, pure instruments, actually 
become principles of death. Thus it comes 
about that life is exhausted in efforts towards 
self-preservation, allows itself to be converted 
by matter into captive eddies, sometimes even 
abandons itself to the inertia of the weight 
which it ought to raise, and surrenders to the 
downward current which constitutes the essence 
of materiality : it is thus that Evil would be 
defined, as the direction of travel opposed to 
Good. Now, with man, thought, reflection, 
and clear consciousness appear. At the same 
time also properly moral qualifications appear : 
good becomes duty, evil becomes sin. At 
this precise moment, a new problem begins, 
demanding the soundings of a new intuition, 
yet connected at clear and visible points with 
previous problems. 

This is the philosophy which some are 
pleased to say is closed by nature to all 
problems of a certain order, problems of reason 
or problems of morality. There is no doctrine, 
on the contrary, which is more open, and none 
which, in actual fact, lends itself better to 
further extension. 

It is not my duty to state here what I 
believe can be extracted from it. Still less 



CONCLUSION 231 

is it my duty to try to foresee what Mr 
Bergson's conclusions will be. Let us confine 
ourselves to taking it in what it has expressly 
given us of itself. From this point of view, 
which is that of pure knowledge, I must again, 
as I conclude, emphasise its exceptional im- 
portance and its infinite reach. It is possible 
not to understand it. Such is frequently the 
case : thus it always has been in the past, each 
time that a truly new intuition has arisen 
among men ; thus it will be until the inevitable 
day when disciples more respectful of the 
letter than the spirit will turn it, alas, into 
a new scholastic. What does it matter ! The 
future is there ; despite misconceptions, despite 
incomprehensions, there is henceforth the 
departure-point of all speculative philosophy ; 
each day increases the number of minds which 
recognise it ; and it is better not to dwell upon 
the proofs of several of those who are unable 
or unwilling to see it. 



INDEX 



Absolute, the, 113. 

Adaptation, value of, 106. 

Analysis, 1 8 ; conceptual, 
43 ; contrasted with in- 
tuition, 52. 

Appearances, 152. 

Art, and philosophy, 57. 

Atomism, 168. 

Automatism, 98. 

Automaton, of daily life, 86 
seqq. 

Being, as becoming, 88. 
Brain, work of, 197. 

Causality, psychological, 
194. 

Change, 182 seqq. 

Common-sense, 15, 16, 18. 

Concepts, analysis by and 
functions of, 39 ; as sym- 
bols, 44 ; creation of, 46 ; as 
general frames, 47 ; practi- 
cal reach of, 50 ; inferior 
to intuition, 53 ; further 
discussed, 175 seqq. 

Consciousness, 97, 165, 185 
seqq. 



Conservation, 85 ; law of, 

206. 
Constants, search for, 50 ; 

represented, 77. 
Continuity, qualitative, 74. 
Criticism, 36 ; of language, 

38. 

Deduction, impotence of, 
117. 

Degradation, law of, 206. 

Determinism, 82, 192 ; 
physical, 85, 194. 

Discontinuity, apparent, 78. 

Disorder, 106. 

Du Bois-Reymond, 203. 

Duration, real, 80 ; perpetu- 
ally new; 82, 87; and 
thought, 168 ; and time, 
189; pure, 193. 

Dynamic connection, 51 ; 
174; schemes, 169. 

Ego, encrustations of the, 

71. 
Eleatic dialectic, 177, 184. 
Embryology, evidence of, 

101, 204. 



232 



INDEX 



233 



Evil, a reality, 123. 

Evolution, 85 ; drama of, 
95 ; biological, 100 ; value 
and meaning of, 103, 201 ; 
not indispensable, 205 ; 
distinguished from de- 
velopment, 105 ; as dy- 
namic continuity, 107 ; 
as activity, 109 ; further 
discussed, 121. 

Existence, as change, 82. 

Experience, 134. 

Fact, 13. 
Freedom, 83. 
Free-will, 192. 

Genesis, law of, 110. 
Good, a reality, 123 ; a path, 
229. 

Habit, as obstacle, 107. 
Heredity, 91. 
Heterogeneity, 81. 
Homogeneity absence of, 

74. 
Huxley, 203. 

Images, 27, 152. 

Immediacy, 142, 154. 

Immediate, the, 23, 24, 37, 
150. 

Inert, the, 132. 

Instinct, 112; is sympathy, 
1 1 6 ; contrasted with in- 
telligence, 117. 

Intellect ualism, distrusted, 
134. 

Intelligence, 112; product 
of evolution, 115; and 



instinct, 118; broad 
meaning of, 120, 213. 

Intuition, 20 ; as starting- 
point, 48, 53 ; intrans- 
missible without language, 
37 ; aesthetic, 56 ; triumph 
of, 58 ; and duration, 140 ; 
and analysis, 215. 

Intuitional effort, 1 1 ; con- 
tent, 19- 

Kant, 62 ; his point of de- 
parture, 115; conclusions 
of, 157, 164, 212; escape 
from, 214. 

Knowledge, absolute, 35 , 
36 ; utilitarian nature of, 
45 ; new theory of, 218. 

Language, 10, 167 ; dangers 
of, 173. 

Laplace, 203. 

Law, concept of, 104. 

Liberty, 82 ; personal im- 
portance of, 84, 192 seqq. 

Life, tendencies of, 90 seqq. ; 
is finality, 108 ; is pro- 
gress, 114; further dis- 
cussed, 213, 215. 

Limit-concepts, 180. 

Materialism, 109. 

Mechanism, psychological, 
86 ; failure of, 94. 

Memory, problem of, 8 ; per- 
ception complicated by, 
33 ; importance of, 79 ; 
racial, 92 ; planes of, 197 ; 
memory of solids, 95. 



234 



A NEW PHILOSOPHY 



Metaphor, justification of, 
54-55, 75. 

Method, philosophical, 52. 

Mill, Stuart, 186. 

Motor-schemes, 69 ; mecha- 
nisms, 72. 

Mysticism, 113. 

Non-morality, 120. 
Nothingness, 106. 
Number, 65. 

Ontogenesis, 204. 

Palaeontology, evidence of, 
101. 

Parallelism, 66-67. 

Paralogism, 196. 

Perception, 25, 157 ; an art, 
26; affected by memory, 
27 ; further explained, 
28 ; fulfilment of guess- 
work, 30 ; utilitarian sig- 
nification, 30 seqq. ; sub- 
jectivity of, 34 ; pure and 
ordinary, 158; further 
discussed, 162 seqq. ; re- 
lation to matter, 165 ; 
perception of immediacy, 
153. 

Philosophy, duty of, 118, 
119; function of, 1 44 
seqq. 

Phylogenesis, 204. 

Planes, of consciousness, 65. 

Progress, and reality, 72. 

Quality, 33 ; and inner 
world, 77, 207. 



Quantity, and quality, 79, 
207. 

Rationalism, 134. 

Ravaisson, 137, 138, 197. 

Realism, 136. 

Reality, contact with, 11, 
12, 16; a flux, 18, 33; 
recognition of, 33 ; ab- 
solute, 34 ; elusive nature 
of, 51 ; personal, 6l ; 
essentially qualitative, 
73 ; pure, 76 ; inner, 86 ; 
contrasting views about, 
93 ; further discussed, 
179. 

Reason, 219 seqq. 

Relation, between mind and 
matter, 68. 

Religion, its place in philo- 
sophy, 1 24, 225 seqq. 

Renan, 128. 

Romanticism, 121. 

Schemes, dynamic, 169 seqq., 
180. 

Science, 20, 21 ; prisoner 
of symbolism, 60 ; cult 
of, 128; impotence of, 
131. 

Sense, good, and common- 
sense, 149. 

Space, 65. 

Spencer, criticism of, 1 05 ; 
success and weakness of, 
203. 

Spiritualism, 109. 

Symbolism, 175. 

Sympathy, 36. 



INDEX 



235 



Taine, 186. 

Thought, methods of com- 
mon, 49. 

Time, required by Mr Berg- 
son's philosophy, 22 ; in 
space, 80 ; and common- 
sense, 188 ; and duration, 
189. 

Torpor, 112. 



Transformism, 101, 102; 
errors of, 105. 

Utility, 17; as goal of per- 
ception, 160. 

Variation, 105. 

Zeno of Elea, 176. 
Zone, of feeling, 78 seqq. 



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